The modern social religion

'

THE LIBRARY

OF

THE UNIVERSITY
OF CALIFORNIA

GIFT OF

Mrs. Warren Gregory

THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

THE MODERN

SOCIAL RELIGION

BY

HORACE HOLLEY

LONDON AND TORONTO

SIDGWICK & JACKSON, LTD.

1913

GIF?

TO

FRANCIS NEWMAN HOLLEY

IN LOCO PARENTIS

402

INTRODUCTION

UNKNOWN as yet to the many, the historical
phenomenon of Christianity is repeating itself in
our age. Once more, at a time when the
established order, both social and spiritual, has
lost its original vitalizing principle, and ordinary
experience, bewildered by the clash of tradition
with new tendencies, is compelled to look outside
itself for the creative vision, a master personality
has appeared, whose experience gathered from
society all that is essential and permanent, gave
it a new unity, definition, and significance, and
thus restored a universal religious currency to
men. The Bahai movement presents many re-
markable parallels with Christianity. In place
of John the Baptist, the discerning and articulate
element within orthodoxy able to feel the new
birth about to take place from the old body, we
have Mohammed Ali, the famous " Bab," who
announced the prophetic manifestation nineteen
years before the event ; then the tremendous
figure of Baha'o'llah, centralizing and universal-

vii

Vlll INTRODUCTION

izing the movement ; meanwhile the inevitable
accompaniment of persecution, a marvellous out-
burst of pure faith ; and last (this circumstance
unique in the world's religious history), the
propagation of Baha'o'llah's teaching by his
eldest son, Abdul Baha, insuring its integrity.
Originating in Persia only a generation ago,
the movement has already penetrated far to
the East and West, its followers numbering
millions of men and women, who represent every
religion, philosophy, race, class, and colour.
I have devoted a chapter to this dramatic
story, covering the period from the Bab's
declaration down to Abdul Baha's memorable
visit to Europe and America during the years
1912-13. It is with the Bahai teaching, which
extends religion so as to include modern science,
and morality so as to coincide with modern
economic and political conditions, that I have
been chiefly concerned. But I have endeavoured
to present it as a system inevitable in terms of
our social evolution, and therefore approached
Bahaism step by step, working gradually toward
it through familiar types and problems, I pre-
ferred, in short, to derive Baha'o'llah's unique
relation to the modern world from the sheer logic
and advantage of his teaching, rather than to
derive the logic and advantage of his teaching

INTRODUCTION IX

from any authority arbitrarily attached, even by
reverent love, to his person or to his relation to
the modern world. It seemed to me that in
this way a wider and more enduring interest
in and for the movement could be secured. So
it is that I have begun this book as though
Bahaism, its founders, its teaching, and its
believers did not exist, but have summoned, as
it were, a convention of all men and women
of goodwill, reverence, and natural though often
bewildered faith a convention which, out of its
own experience, comes to agree upon certain
fundamental conclusions concerning society and
the spiritual life, and certain methods by which
these conclusions can best be realized in action.
These conclusions are no other than the Bahai
teaching ; the method is no other than the
relation of Baha'o'llah to social evolution. For
the deeper interest arising from unprejudiced
personal agreement, I willingly forewent the
advantage I possessed in the fact that Bahaism
has already established itself throughout the

world.

HORACE HOLLEY.

PARIS,

May 2, 19] 3.

THE OUTLOOK

CONTENTS

PART I

1

PART II

A DEFINITION OF HUMAN NATURE - - 19

PART III

THE NEW SOCIAL SYNTHESIS - - - 79

PART IV

THE DIVINE TEACHER .... 129

PART V

HISTORY OF THE BAHAI MOVEMENT - - - 155

PART VI

THE BAHAI TEACHING SUMMARIZED - 186

APPENDIX I

A PILGRIMAGE TO THONON - - - 209

APPENDIX II

A PRAYER FOR UNITY - - - 218

APPENDIX III

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF BAHAI LITERATURE - - 220

XI

" I believe that at this very hour the great
revolution is beginning which has been pre-
paring for two thousand years in the religious
world the revolution which will substitute for
corrupted religion, and the system of domina-
tion which proceeds therefrom, the true
Religion, the basis of equality between men,
and of the true liberty to which all beings en-
dowed with reason aspire." TOLSTOY.

PART I

THE OUTLOOK

THE intellectual despair of the past generation,
best represented, perhaps, by the poetry of
Matthew Arnold, has become an unnecessary if
not impossible condition. We can accept the
agnostic attitude as a splendid display of
courageous sincerity, as a tradition of sym-
pathetic tolerance not lightly to be forgotten,
but we need assume neither its conclusion nor its
pain. Within two decades, enlightened Euro-
pean sentiment has gone over from intelligent
scepticism to intelligent mysticism, from manly
denial to manly affirmation and activity. Re-
ligion, in fact, with its eternal power to intensify
the inward life, has swept back into human
experience. It offers once more the possession
of a great happiness independent of outward
circumstances ; it restores again an ennobling
admiration, a renewing activity, to the most

3

4 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

indifferent life. Its latest return, however, is
made notable by the phenomenon that its origin
does not exist in the deep, undisciplined heart of
the people, but in the scientific and philosophic
mind ; that it has not appeared as a popular
excitement, overwhelming by its very intensity
and volume, whatever condemnation or denial
a highly-educated minority might pronounce
against it, but rather, derived from the develop-
ment of knowledge by that same minority, it has
actually been carried by them to the people.
The scientist, compelled to realize the presence
of psychic forces in the universe, admits to the
shepherd that his hope of immortality is founded
in reason ; the philosopher, becoming aware of
sources of knowledge beyond reason, and func-
tions of activity above intellect, constitutes him-
self the willing priest of prophetic Revelation.

By some mysterious fertilizing process, some
slow but effectual fermentation, the human mind
seems to have attained a new condition of health.
Enriched by generations of discovery and in-
vestigation, it finds itself no longer divided, but
whole. To the shepherd's and fisherman's passion
for personal holiness, the modern man can ally,
as an added factor of enjoyment and power, the

THE OUTLOOK 5

treasures of knowledge accumulated since the
passing of Christ. That precious secret of great
souls throughout history, that a man may be
both wise and mystical, both profoundly learned
and simply, even tenderly faithful, has at last
been whispered abroad to our common inspira-
tion. After so much doubt, so much restlessness,
so much confusion, so much agony both in-
dividual and social, we know for ever and
unchangeably know that our intellectual and
spiritual natures can not only be reconciled from
their long attitude of mutual opposition and
stultification, but fused into one eager, throbbing
instrument of purpose and power. Man is no
longer cleft in two, his courage severed from his
happiness, his initiative parted from his virtue.
No. He is a wonderful, complex unity, an
eternal equilibrium of soul, sense, and reason,
fitted to draw pleasure from the three worlds of
spirit, body, and mind, at home in each, and given
some authority in all. All the old sources of
happiness are restored, with an added faculty of
discrimination and creative receptivity. The old
neglected gardens of faith open before us, to
enter if we will. Whether we study St. Augus-
tine to learn the beginning and process of faith,

6 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

or meditate upon the life of St. Francis to enter
the mystery of adoration, by the sure token of
the universality of spiritual experience, we shall
find them more modern than Haeckel, even as
they are more profound than Taine.

Another phenomenon, however, even more
remarkable and significant than the intellectual
origin of modern faith, is the coeval appearance
in our civilization of another source and centre
of loyal devotion. Indeed, this contemporary
movement, the movement for social reform
throughout all the phases of human endeavour,
possesses a far broader social basis and an in-
finitely more extended following. Within its
scope must be included, even though they share
no common organization, the search for a truer
democracy than any yet attained, manifested in
every government on earth as a progressive
instability, a falling forward, so to speak, from
adjustment to adjustment ; the Socialist propa-
ganda, which means a similar need for economic
justice ; the splendid fight for women's rights,
in which are held suspended consequences
vastly more important to human welfare than
either Democracy or Socialism ; " Modernism "
in the Catholic Church, which represents a

THE OUTLOOK 7

determined effort to unite ecclesiasticism with
modern science ; the rise of scientific charity ;
the foundations for international peace, with
which logically must be associated the develop-
ment of a universal language for secondary use ;
the concentration of capital into great corpora-
tions, which makes possible a future economic
efficiency not wholly removed from economic
justice ; while neither last nor least, perhaps, we
may add the almost imperceptible yet radical
changes at work modifying both the ideals and
methods of education. I have no need to men-
tion the numerous other social activities now
going forward, nor to discuss at any length those
already included, to exhibit the incredible extent
of this modern insistence upon social regeneration
and reform. Each activity stamps its own clear,
stern impression of power and significance,
evoking a response which, whether sympathetic
or hostile, invariably connotes a deep recognition
of that power. Not one movement but drives
to the heart of some unendurable agony or
shame ; not one but reveals the unhealed stab
of some social inequality or the rusted chains
of some social sin. These movements have
gathered to themselves most of our positive

8 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

idealism as well as most of our collective will.
Like so many crusades, they hurl themselves
against traditional authority with self-forgetful
passion, knowing only too well that in privilege,
grown powerful and presumptuous, lies, insulted
or ignored, the true cross of redress. This com-
mon necessity and indignation drives them all,
and one other fundamental identity unites the
limbs of this otherwise unco-ordinated social
body.

The revival of religious faith and mysticism
among philosophers and scientists I have re-
marked as a modern phenomenon. I have stated
that they are constituting themselves the
voluntary apostles of Divine Revelation, carry-
ing that message of spiritual renewal and intensi-
fication to the people, instead of receiving, as in
the past, a spiritual regeneration from them.
But what response are these enlightened mission-
aries able to arouse ? What is the answer given
by the people to this invitation to re-enter the
inner garden of mysticism and faith ? They
return no answer at all, since from the nature of
things they cannot understand the appeal. It is
explicable only to the few possessing the
academic training or sheer intellectual power

THE OUTLOOK 9

necessary to follow the new argument through-
out its psychological and biological evolution.
Simple, essential as the final conclusion may be,
it has been strained through an intellectual
medium unknown and unknowable to the many,
with the result that the scientists and philos-
ophers find themselves shut off from men by the
wall of their own specialized training. To the
majority, religion is still enveloped in a tradi-
tional theology and ecclesiasticism, and they
cannot imagine a spiritual activity without their
old enemy, the priest. We might wonder,
therefore, if the old exaltation had for ever fled
our social consciousness ; if the great heart of
Europe were at last broken by its new burden of
mechanical industry ; if materialism had utterly
blighted both the memory and the desire of that
inward assurance which recovered, for each
generation, from the scorching heat of war or the
desolate winter of famine, the first, fine, careless
rapture of human life. We might wonder
whether even spirituality, the presence of God in
His children, were not to become an aristocratic
privilege, dependent upon the possession of a
trained mind, or at least upon immunity from
the de-spiritualizing process of factory and tene-

10 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

merit. To the Christian ideal of personal salva-
tion, at all events, men seem increasingly
indifferent. In losing their reverence for the
cloistered saint as the highest human ideal, the
majority have also put away all interest in the
psychological or religious method and evolution
by which the ascetic and celibate types are pro-
duced. The healthiest modern conscience, in
short, has rejected for ever the once-adored
Christian mystery. That is, neither publicly
nor privately will it announce its own utter
sinfulness and depravity, with its consequent
dependence upon gospel or priest. It will not
imitate nor readily admire Augustine's confes-
sion and self-crucifixion as the indispensable
beginning of a new life in God. By his denial
of such confessions, therefore, the modern man
shatters for all time the solemn gothic splendour
of the Christian tradition.

But must such denial and indifference shatter
also the possibility of divine manhood ; must it
destroy all religious mystery, all spiritual con-
sciousness and growth ; must it, in a word,
prevent the co-operation of God in the human
soul ? Before answering this ultimate and all-
important question, or permitting any authority

THE OUTLOOK 11

whatever to answer it for us, let us ask a further
question of the facts we have combined. Among
what social elements is derived this second
activity I have touched upon, this determined
passion for social purity and equality, this
devoted, tireless effort to bring about a better,
fairer world ? Surely, among those very types
and classes who most vigorously oppose the
Christian tradition ! To the enlightened mysti-
cism offered by philosophy as, after all, the truest
possible personal ideal, the people, self-reliant and
confident, oppose the ideal of social service. In
some blind, unconscious, intuitive manner, the
masses feel a subtle danger inevitably latent
within the old religious experience an unknown,
decentralizing force to which they must never
again yield if they hope to carry out their pro-
gramme of reform. They know that once
entered upon, the religious path will lead them
away, one by one, from the world and its wrongs,
leaving those wrongs as a heritage to their
children's children and in their children's children
for ever. Unconsciously, intuitively also, they
feel that religion should not contain such a
danger, should not threaten the success of their
cause that this of itself constitutes part of the

12 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

complex injustice by which they suffer yet, if
Christianity and Socialism be inalterably opposed,
so much the worse for Christianity. In vain,
therefore, the preacher points out the fact that
this nameless force they resist is the Divine
Presence ; that if they yield entirely to this
directing power, they will find a great inward
happiness more than compensating for all oppres-
sion, a delight in pain itself, and, at last, a
passionately triumphant acquiescence in humility
and obedience. It is in vain. Somehow the
ancient appeal has lost its intoxication, the great
challenge its compelling reality. The modern
man is not concerned with his own possible
damnation. He is too much concerned with the
actual damnation of the world.

In this condition of affairs we have two sets of
opposing forces the opposition of classes and
the opposition of ideas. This mutual hostility
has served to make each movement more definite
and self-conscious, compelling each to look to the
truth and the human desirability of its claim ; but
it has served also to divide and weaken our avail-
able social power. To all intents and purposes
the Western world has two camps the Christian
and the Socialist. All men and women belong

THE OUTLOOK 13

to one or the other, either by reason of disposition
and belief, of environment, or social and economic
necessity. Yet already there is an increasing
number who detest the confinement imposed
upon them by adherence to one cause, with the
involved hostility to the other. Many an earnest
Christian has gone over to the Socialists, carrying
his religious faith into the other camp. Reform,
they say, is only the extension of the Golden
Rule ; and thus we see a third division arising,
including those Christians who accept the
Socialist ideal and those Socialists who feel the
need of the religious life. It is the purpose of
this book to follow each line of advance the
advance of Christianity toward Socialism, and
the advance of Socialism toward Christianity
endeavouring thereby to make as clear as possible
the exact nature of that ideal, Christian-Socialism,
which undoubtedly represents the future faith ;
and then to connect these social tendencies with
a teaching recently given the world, whose in-
fluence has come to be the most powerful existing
impetus towards rational and helpful religion.
Meanwhile, to arrive at the point which permits
a true perspective on the ideal of Christian-
Socialism, and permits a sympathetic appreciation

14 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

of the tremendous differences raising it above
either Christianity, so-called, or above mere
Socialism, we must once more briefly consider
the two centres of activity at work in society.

First, then, there is the revitalization of personal
spirituality made possible by the final agreement
of philosophy and religion, science and faith, with
its attendant recovery of a long-lost possesion of
joy and steadfastness independent of outward cir-
cumstances. Second, the accumulating instinct
and passion for social reform, indicated by
the change in the centres of popular admira-
tion from the saint to the plainer but more
useful public man, this second source of activity
attracting the majority with far greater autho-
rity and power than religion, even in its modern
adaptation. Like two mighty currents, they
flow through our time. We can neither deny
their power nor ignore their effect. We can
only stand silent between them and reverently
ponder how they will influence each other and
how both will influence mankind. We remem-
ber that the one river rises from the unchang-
ing throne of God ; that in it are the divine
attributes of joy, steadfastness, peace; while
the other rises only from the agony and need

THE OUTLOOK 15

of men, containing the despised gifts of political
equality, economic independence, and the uni-
versal opportunity for education and self-de-
velopment. Both, however, share one common
property that of making us forget, if we stoop
and drink deeply from one, the existence of the
other. No man can behold in pure ecstasy the
attributes of God within his own soul without
straightway losing concern for the world. The
invariable effect of this divine possession, this
" God-intoxication," is to intensify the importance
of all personality and magnify into a new pro-
portion the selves of men. Henceforth the pos-
sessor sees in every man an object of transcendent
intrinsic importance, to be partially identified
with God Himself and brought to a similar state
of spiritual consciousness by individual treatment
to be saved, in other words, at all costs. In-
ward spiritual happiness impels men to share
their experience with others by a tireless energy
more unselfish than motherhood. Likewise no
man can ever completely realize the inherent in-
justice and diabolical unreasonableness of the
social structure, burning at the same time with
an inward vision of what humanity should and
could be, without straightway flinging down,

16 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

once and for ever, his former desire for personal
salvation. He sees the world as a vast, ill-
adjusted machine, menacing the physical, mental,
and moral health of all its inhabitants at all times.
In people he sees only the accidental favourable
or unfavourable effect of environment. He has,
therefore, only a scant concern for the individual
with whom he comes in contact the individual
is already stamped with the trade-mark of the
machine but his whole being writhes with a
fierce passion to change the machine itself, before
countless other lives are marred by its gigantic
inefficiency. The single flowers he leaves to the
sweet devotion of a St. Francis ; but the garden
itself, those conditions of earth and air which
determine all future plants, this he takes as his
Arch-Fiend and Tempter, the annihilating Satan
which he must resist and overcome with every
breath and muscle and thought within him,
whether the gods aid and reward him or not.

These two types of men are diametrically
opposed. The one cannot understand why the
other neglects the opportunity of infinite beati-
tude for the sake of material, transient things ;
the latter cannot understand why the religious
man devotes himself to a handful of people, when

THE OUTLOOK 17

the whole future race is mathematically doomed
to imperfection and pain. The compromise, the
temperate drinking of these waters should be
impossible, since it argues either the inability or
disinclination to live our human life deeply and
rightly. In such a case, to choose wrongly is
wiser than to compromise and abstain. Yet
before giving ourselves irrevocably to either
movement, we should see where and how these
two currents meet, that we may not condemn
ourselves to the fatal inadequacy of the opposed
types just considered. We have every right to
insist that our personal spirituality prove service-
able to men and that our service, whether
political or social, contain that religious motive
which makes men clean and glad and strong.

PART II

A DEFINITION OF HUMAN NATURE

II

LEAVING our ideas in this balanced opposition
for a moment, let us turn to the world itself and
learn how the two forces are really working
themselves out in terms of history and finding
expression in human nature. For of one fact we
can be always and wholly certain : that life
itself, rightly or wrongly, blindly or intelligently,
must push forward through the generations.
Nature's activity is independent of our will, even
our spiritual passion ; and whether the few or
the many prosper or fail, as we have learned to
estimate prosperity and failure, humanity dili-
gently replenishes its stock, and the story is told
somehow to the end. Nature cannot distinguish
or prefer : she is concerned with toothache more
than poetry ; weeds flourish brazenly in our
neglected garden, and where we have lost the
rose we shall find the broom. Indeed, this sense
of a primitive, triumphant vitality in life throws

21

22 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

a tragic shadow over every individual experience.
Our own happiness, after all, means so little to
others ; and our most desperate agony of failure
or remorse creeps hopelessly into the outer dark-
ness of the world's oblivion.

Yet, what is this unconscious humanity ?
What is this social juggernaut which, by some
inexplicable wrongness in things, has the power
to make us at once its high priests and its
sacrifices, its executioners, and its victims ? We
need ask for no ideal motive whatever ; it is
more than enough if we ask from selfishness,
so-called, and from fear. Each may look out of
his own window at the world the view, after
all, is much the same.

It being our first purpose to understand the
point of view of the type which despises the
power of religion and trusts to social science for
the cure of those structural errors which limit
and repress our human life, we can surely do so
most fairly and adequately by entering into those
experiences which tend to produce such a stand-
point in ordinary men and women. Before
collecting material for analysis, however, I wish
to introduce a short digression, in order that my
analyses will be followed with greater sympathy,

A DEFINITION OF HUMAN NATURE 23

and my final deduction be received with deeper
comprehension of its real importance.

History, or the annals of mankind, being
necessarily written from an impersonal, extra-
human point of view, the historian is compelled
to establish his perspective outside and beyond
any individual man or woman. There being, on
the one hand, no individual who possesses the
attribute either of immortality or ubiquity, both
of which are demanded to make possible a history
with an individual perspective and continuity ;
and, on the other hand, the fact being evident
that even could such an individual be supplied to
the historian, the resulting history would most
certainly be, if not incomprehensible, yet un-
sympathetic to the rest of us all this being the
case, the historian compromises by establishing
his perspective either within an institution or an
idea, since institutions and ideas are, compara-
tively speaking, both ubiquitous and immortal.
Instead of writing history in terms of personal
experience, therefore, the historian writes his
records of human life in terms of churches,
nations, races, art, science, or some such abstract
idea as the evolution of political liberty. Sup-
plied with such an impersonal point of view, he

24 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

can collect all his facts into unity and clearness.
He can present a story intelligible and of more
or less concern to all. If he creates an historical
narrative from the national perspective, for
example, he establishes in the past a certain
importance and personal interest for all inhabi-
tants of that nation or those deriving from those
inhabitants ; if he discusses a Church, he
establishes in the past an importance and
personal interest for all members of that par-
ticular ecclesiastical division. Likewise with
economics or the evolution of political freedom,
by selecting from the past the elements that
enter into our own present economic or political
situation, he endows the past with meaning and
moment to all men in proportion as all men are
affected by finance and government. But we
do not lose sight of the fact that this method is
a compromise. In securing for his narrative a
relative interest and importance, the historian
sacrifices the particular interest and importance.
He sinks the individual citizen into the nation,
the individual soul into the Church. Magnifying
institutions, he minimizes personality ; emphasiz-
ing ideas and things, he weakens men. But
institutions, whether great or small, transient or

A DEFINITION OF HUMAN NATURE 25

enduring, have absolutely no importance nor
even existence except in so far as they affect the
consciousness of men and women. After all,
humanity is nothing more than you and I, the
butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker, their
wives and children, associated into a badly-
understood and badly-conducted partnership,
whose only conceivable object is to attain and
secure our own best welfare. Of what possible
human avail is a powerful institution if its
members, taken separately, remain pusillani-
mous ; of what possible meaning is the propaga-
tion of a Divine Ideal if the contributed human
lives remain worldly and base ? By uniting the
efforts of a thousand comparatively ineffectual
people, we can doubtless create an organization
which shall exhibit remarkable effectiveness.
The Great Pyramid, we recall, was built by a
horde of wretched slaves. If the object of this
human existence consist in the erection of an
impressive tomb, then by concentrating our
attention upon the completed pyramid we can
easily overlook the servitude it required, or even
more easily we can reconcile the chained bodies
and the chained souls with the heap of unfeeling
stone those bodies and souls were spent for.

26 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

But the fact remains that to the slaves them-
selves, most of whom not only perished before
the pyramid was completed, but suffered physical
agony and spiritual suffocation during every
hour of their enforced activity upon it, its
ultimate significance, architectural or symbolical,
must have proved not merely an unsatisfactory
compensation, but an inhuman, an unspeakable
insult. While admitting the fact in this par-
ticular instance, the reader will add that it is our
very weakness and helplessness which makes any
institution necessary ; that we are not slaves
fulfilling a tyrant's caprice, but free men and
women, deriving a more than adequate return in
safety, efficiency or happiness from the institu-
tions we support ; and that our allegiance, being
voluntary, can be broken, renewed, or transferred
at our own discretion. The institution, indeed,
when subordinated to personality, contributes to
both our need and our well-being ; but I cannot
insist too strongly that every institution possesses
a subtle, centripetally-operating force which,
unless eternally resisted, transfers our conscious-
ness from men to things, from human experience
to mere numbers and size.

Though institutions are both powerful and

A DEFINITION OF HUMAN NATURE 27

enduring, while all men are weak and mortal,
yet it is not the record of any institution, how-
ever ideal its purpose, by which you and I must
measure life and determine its true value. No.
The value of life is its worth to individual men
and women at single successive instants. If all
the flags in the world are flaunted to the bright
sun, if all the Masses are being loudly chanted,
all the prayers grandiloquently read, yet, while
the majority of men and women are wretched,
life is a wretched business, and the glory of
nations and sanctity of religions is either an
angel's aspiration or a devil's lie. Do not be
deceived in this matter. Let us not find our
security in statistics, but in our own ability.
Let us not submissively drag out a useless,
hampered existence, and then to our dimming
eyes and chilling heart hug the illusion either
of flag, cross, or our own still hopeful, still eager
children. Whatever they are, we are broken
and inglorious, a worn-out hypocrite creeping
into his shameful, but restful, grave. Our
institution deserts us then ; our wife and children
remain isolated and independent personalities;
we have only our naked soul at that hour, built
inexorably up from the successive experiences

28 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

we ourselves have undergone, and may God
keep us all from discovering too late the spiritual
impotence of the world.

So much for the digression. I hope I have
transferred the scale by which we should measure
life from its false position in the institution to
its true position in the soul. I hope I have
scotched, for a few men and women, the head
of Eden's eternal serpent, a blind trust in
material things. We can now return to the
task of collecting material for analysis.

Your neighbour, for example, awakes some
morning to find his business threatened by
unforeseen commercial readjustments his very
economic existence, as it were, abruptly, brutally
summoned before a blind, capricious judge to
be tried for life and death. As a modern man,
he will defend his economic self with almost the
same desperation that he would summon up to
resist an assault upon his physical being, since
at our stage of social progress the two are well-
nigh identical ; and he suddenly realizes how
vitally all that is superior, enjoyable, comfortable,
or even decent has become entangled in this
question of wealth. He feels the same blind,
instinctive terror, followed instantly by a shock

A DEFINITION OF HUMAN NATURE 29

of supremely-wrathful indignation against the
hostile force, whether personal or impersonal,
individual or organized, that he feels against the
bully who leaps upon him from the dark, or the
enormous, pitiless army, slowly, but irresistibly,
approaching his native town.

As to the man seized by the plague, the whole
world is changed. He has become aware of an
outer darkness just beyond our busy, electric-
lighted thoroughfares, which holds in ambush
an eternal, relentless foe. He knows that it is
only incidental that he is the present victim
that this enemy is the enemy of all men, but
can strike only those who wander or are thrust
too near the fatal line. He wonders how men
and women can laugh or quarrel about trifles
in the neighbourhood of such a foe. He wants
aid, sympathy, fellowship, and turns to society
as the exhausted swimmer looks yearningly at
the .shore. There, however, he finds a great
indifference to his personal fate, but an equal
indifference to its own danger. In the public
parks, though, he may notice certain shabby,
silent men sitting meaninglessly on the benches
in the sun. Beneath their squalor he sees, with
a new and poignant penetration, the all but

30 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

obliterated marks of respectability ; beneath their
ineffectual, empty apathy, he discerns an old
vigour and intelligence; beneath their turgid
despair he rediscovers the throbbing heart of
man's holy sorrow and delight. These men,
he whispers to himself, these men were once
what I am; these men are what I may be;
and at the thought his soul seems to stand at
the edge of some burning desert of tribulation,
too vast for terror, too awful for grief. In these
broken old men he realizes that there is neither
sympathy nor help ; they have lost the power
to understand or feel another's misfortune, even
when it mirrors back their own, while broken
and socially impotent as they have become,
they can no longer raise a hand to point out
or stay the common tragedy. In them, however,
he sees the ghastly warnings which time and
destiny have raised to prevent the recurrence
of such misery in other lives the skeletons
strewn along the sand of that desert to frighten
away the social caravan but, as he turns away,
he knows that not until now has the warning
been legible, and that had he not faced their ruin
in himself he would have remained completely
indifferent, or, which is no better, in the ordinary

A DEFINITION OF HUMAN NATURE 31

state of personal sympathy, which cares for the
wounded and buries the dead without knowing
just where the battlefield lies or just who is the
enemy.

Your neighbour, however, knows both. From
that day he knows that the battlefield extends
over our whole social life, and includes every
phase of human activity ; that economics proper
is only the front line of that army of defence
in which every science has its own peculiar and
important part. But he knows more. In a
vague, yet decided and terrible way, he knows
that the enemy is not a superhuman power,
vested in the processes of wind and tide, nor
even a distinct, definable class of society. No.
Friend and foe wear the same uniform, employ
the same weapons, stand side by side, face to
face, and back to back in one awful, frantic chaos
and desolation. Lifelong friends unwittingly
contribute to one another's downfall; fathers
pass or approve laws which in the future may
wound their own children's well-being. Nay,
even more; for your neighbour finds that he
himself has proudly and resolutely held views
which he now sees opening like deadly mines
underfoot. As in some tremendous Old Testa-

32 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

ment vision he beholds our modern unregulated
competitive industrialism like a vast, unimpeach-
able conspiracy, in which every man, employer,
or workman, rich or poor, necessarily is a
member, and of which all men are potentially
the victims.

Yet, to his great comfort, he discovers that he
is not utterly alone in this realization. Great
spirits of the past, who possessed the power of
social observation, have laid the foundation of
a cleaner, sweeter labouring humanity. Round
these names, as round undaunted banners which
no selfishness and no blindness can pull down,
rally an increasing number of individuals and
groups, each aware of the common danger, and
intent only upon destroying the cause. Your
neighbour, therefore, if he luckily avoids financial
ruin, or, having failed, retains means enough to
secure a little leisure, allies himself with some
such society as being the only tool available to
his purpose and need. The Church offers him
no leverage, for its business is the saving of
souls ; like the State, it is worse than useless,
for its roots draw their nourishment from the
very soil he hopes to plough over and resow.
Private societies, accordingly, little States within

A DEFINITION OF HUMAN NATURE 38

the national State, offer him a footing; and
thankful for even a foothold in ground he has
learned to fear like quicksand, he takes up the
task of reform.

Henceforth, his life consists of one revelation
upon another. First, he learns the impotence
of the individual. A leaf might have more
possibility of controlling the tree than one man
this monstrous organism ; a drop of water could
easier stop the tide than one man the fluctuations
of this social sea. Through organization, on the
other hand, he can reasonably hope to prove
effective, since the organization supplies a lever
whose working force multiplies by membership.
To render the organization powerful, however,
he next learns that the individual must subject
his own opinion to the general will. In his
present state of mind, this demands no sacrifice.
Indeed, he wonders how any man can cling to
his own whims and prejudices in the face of such
overwhelming necessity. Like a soldier to his
captain, he looks only to the official head for
command, and does not so much obey a personal
authority as the compelling spirit of battle.
His next discovery is the presence of countless
other societies, a thousand little states jealously

3

34 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

carved from the national body. Each is funda-
mentally like his own, an organization composed
of men who, either by rare sympathy or bitter
experience, have grown aware of certain un-
necessary evils preventing humanity from its full
flower and springtime, certain sicknesses, as it
were, within the social frame which irritate,
perplex, and discourage the mind of man.

While all the world is busy with its walnuts
and wine, these devoted, intelligent few live
only for their cause, their self-imposed trust and
responsibility. But these other organizations,
while not hostile to his own, but, on the contrary,
equally consecrated to the general welfare, prove,
nevertheless, a resisting, deterring influence to
its beneficial effects, and an unconscious brake
upon its triumphant progress. This is not
only because the other organizations have
amassed a certain number of valuable men and
women into one compact body against which
his ideas vainly strike ; not only because the
social river is thereby crowded with shipping
which impedes his own free navigation ; but
rather because each organization has become the
centre of an ideal, and by its very intensifying
and spiritualizing power has separated certain

A DEFINITION OF HUMAN NATURE 35

human hopes into an isolated, self-conscious
virtue. That is, producing a distinct ideal, each
organization sets up a new tendency among the
unorganized majority, a new direction for the
unguided efforts of the race. But the average
man, the man who has only a limited social
energy to expend after fulfilling the daily
demands of his own family, but who, being the
average man, therefore supplies the source of all
social energy, this man, confronted by a multi-
tude of organizations, finds his interest divided
and his energy scattered into as many different
channels. Concerned rather with social welfare
in general than with any particular phase of it,
he would naturally prefer to see the results of
his activity count immediately and directly for
the general benefit. Instead, he must give a
penny here, a half-hour there; he must read
a mere paragraph or two from each chapter if
he hopes to cover the book ; or he must con-
centrate upon one ideal and neglect the rest.
In either event, the result in terms of society
is the same division and loss of energy, or
concentration and sacrifice of the broad, effective,
statesmanlike vision. And he learns only too
soon that the efficiency of these social organiza-

THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

tions is not more than 10 per cent. His con-
tributions of time and money are largely wasted
on mere organization expense.

But the breadth of outlook and consequent
co-ordination of energy usually sacrificed is
precisely the one essential social virtue. Your
neighbour, who by this time has become a wiser
and sadder, if not discouraged man, accepts this
fact as the very heart of his experience. He
knows that scientific investigation, international
peace, and other admirable activities are often
made possible only by funds contributed by
interests inherently opposed to the result such
activities supremely desire ; he knows that the
resources of a Christian church in New York
were for a long time invested in a manner that
would make an I ago blush for shame. Every-
where he sees a division more fatal than the
chasm between rich and poor, white and black,
Oriental and Occidental the division in man's
ownjiature. Within us all the economic man
strangles the spiritual man, the patriot manacles
the Christian, the husband and father outvote
the philanthropist. This division is absolutely
fatal, since it brings an enfeebled, cowardly
human nature to the task of its own regeneration.

A DEFINITION OF HUMAN NATURE 37

By making it impossible for the Christian clergy-
man to preach the real Christ, and equally
impossible for the layman to live the real Christ,
we appoint a desperately sick man his own
physician.

Now, to prevent anyone from objecting that I
insist too strongly on the economic situation to
prevent any of those excellent people who, never
having lain awake in the cold sweat of poverty,
think that wealth, or a', least a competence, is
God's own Who's Who of righteousness to
prevent these sound sleepers from believing that
such insistence is only unbalanced demagogy I
shall give one more example of our social wrong-
ness and stupidity, selecting one that will have
upon it no taint. Your other neighbour is a
successful professional man, happily married,
public spirited, energetic, and sane. Of his three
children, he instinctively loves best his youngest,
a daughter of fourteen. She is a slight, sensitive
little spirit, exceptionally receptive, yet not at all
abnormal. Pioneer ancestors have contributed a
vitality and elasticity tempered and refined by
the blood of scholars. She gives every promise
of rich, noble womanhood, conspicuous and
valuable by its possession of spiritual significance.

38 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

All this, be it understood, is appreciated by your
neighbour and his wife. One day the child
seems dull and silent, the next she asks permission
to remain at home, and by evening lies under
medical attention, a feverish, overwrought little
nervous system. She has been over-conscientious
in her studies and over-sensitive in her relations
with her mates, and, being the stock and fibre she
is, has driven herself unnoticed to the verge of
the last precipice, responding with every delicate
nerve and sense both to the presence of an ill-
assorted group of children, and to the pressure of
a heavy, impersonal educational machine. While
her mother, consequently, gives twenty hours
daily to the crushed flower, wondering if those
little bruised petals will ever again unfold to the
sun, her father, not less devoted though removed,
nor less anxious though busy with his own
routine her father may well wonder what pro-
vision society makes for its exceptions, its superior
types, and whether much deviation from the
hearty, undiscriminating average is desirable in
our world.

A fierce resentment comes over him as he
learns the systematized, inelastic trust-company
methods of modern public instruction, which

A DEFINITION OF HUMAN NATURE 39

operates upon the mind with no heed of the
body from which it derives and reacts, and, like
a wild, arcadian dream, he begins to picture a
truer education. He sees in every boy and girl
an ideal possibility an embryonic manhood and
womanhood compounded less of information than
of aspiration, less of learning accurately than
feeling deeply, less of systematized brain-cells
than a harmonious co-ordination between spirit,
mind, and body. He recalls his own school- days,
and his matured experience reviews his childhood
and youth, when, with every other boy, he " did
what he was told, as well as he could." He
traces his progress through school, college, and
business ; and at every successful period of his
career, every point where he rose to the full tide
of power and accomplishment, he distinctly
recognizes that the elements directly responsible
for success had been the enthusiasm and imagina-
tion that entered into his work, not the infor-
mation. Moreover, he recognizes that the
country life general during his boyhood had
unconsciously effected a natural relationship
between thought-circulation and blood-circula-
tion which has never been replaced for the
children of towns and cities, although the

40 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

intellectual demands made upon adolescence are
at least double those made a generation ago.
Information, he observes, is only the paid servant
of education ; and he resolves the whole conflict
between classics and sciences, Greek and econom-
ics, into one simple, luminous rule ; that those
subjects only should be offered which release
the child's latent enthusiasm : that Greek is more
valuable than book-keeping in this respect,
merely because it contains those elements of
idealism and magnanimity which do so unfold
the eager wings of youth ; that Greek itself is
usually spoiled because it is presented as disci-
pline rather than as opportunity for admiration ;
and finally, that, after all, the poetic tradition of
one's own language and race is by far the best
educational agency. Enthusiasm and admiration
once aroused, the rest is easy, and the vocational
training obligatory to all social existence will be
eagerly undergone as the necessary means to a
highly -desirable end. The acquisition of detail
to one really in love with his subject is as rapid
and easy as the study of topography by an
aviator. While the men beneath him are
stopped by every hedge and lost in every wood,
he sails freely, magnificently on, picking out a

A DEFINITION OF HUMAN NATURE 41

river here and a mountain there, making serene
use of details instead of being confused and
baffled by them. Jurisprudence, therefore, is a
passion to the born lawyer, just as metre is a
divine sport to the born poet ; though if we were
to believe the ordinary advocate and scribbler,
these are worse confounded than the streets of
Constantinople. Facility in the use of detail is
entirely a matter of perspective, which in turn is
a matter of enthusiasm and ambition derived
from natural fitness. This enthusiasm in himself,
he knows, had contributed a romance and magic
to the obscurest points of his profession; and
that without such spontaneity he would never
have risen beyond a clerkship. The music and
gymnastics of the Greeks, accordingly, assume
not only an idealistic, but a very practical value
in human life, and your neighbour passes a brick
school-house with a shudder as from a prison.

Reaching these conclusions, your neighbour
feels a strong impulse to stop people on the street
and tell them. He feels like the Columbus of
some new, fallow, opulent America, and the joy
of discovery is so intense that he is eager to give
away square miles of virgin soil to all who stand
in need. He looks about and undertakes an

42 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

investigation into the whole problem of education.
It makes no difference to this purpose that his
daughter recovered after a year in the calm,
renewing country the iron of wrong has entered
his soul, he sees the outer darkness of inefficiency
and failure crouching imminent beyond the
world's small candle of intellectual manhood and
womanhood, and his public life henceforth is con-
secrated to its ultimate extinction. But he enters
upon the same round of discoveries concerning
the propagation of a superior ideal in education
that has already daunted your first neighbour
concerning the propagation of a superior ideal in
economics, so that hereafter, their problems being
identical, we can identify the two cases and con-
sider them as one.

From whatever angle, obviously, the earnest
man enters this labyrinth, from whatever class or
creed he starts, whatever purpose he has in view,
he is certain to learn about society the facts
already mentioned, with as many more as his
patience and capacity entitle him to receive.
Like the owner of a very large tree in a very
small garden, he finds the roots of his cherished
problem running out into many other people's
territory. He digs about the trunk first, follow-

A DEFINITION OF HUMAN NATU11E 43

ing each tap-root in its sinuous and extensive
progress, but in every instance he is stopped short
by his own limiting wall. Beyond this he cannot
go. And while the tree is slowly blasted before
his eyes he wonders which of his neighbours, or
what process, intentional or otherwise, has
poisoned the plant. All the societies founded,
like his own, for social amelioration, raise their
boundaries and confine him on every side. It
might be possible, he sees, by some extraordinary
general convention, to arrange a constructive
compromise whereby these walls could be pro-
vided with a friendly gate of mutual intercourse
and co-operation; but two walls loom up over
these lower barriers which seem for ever and
inevitably fixed the frontiers of nations and the
hostile antagonism of religions. By the time that
he has worked out to these conclusions, your
neighbour knows too clearly that any one nation
and any one religion represents too small a
section of humanity in which or by which to effect
permanent social reform. The roots of all the
important human problems, in short, are hope-
lessly intertwined and involved without respect
to any religious, racial, or national boundary-
line. By this time, if he is anything more than

44 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

a village official excited about the speed of auto-
mobiles, he has come to regard the nations, the
races, and the religions as so many adjacent
gardens grouped about the single tree of human-
ity. We are all neighbours, he knows, and the
cultivation of each soil-area has its direct in-
fluence upon that tree. Some of us are advanced
and conscientious ; some of us are conscientious
but ignorant ; some are both ignorant and selfish ;
some have already begun to dream of a nobler
tree and fairer fruit ; others scarcely realize that
there is a tree, but lie drowsily in the sun, eating
such fruit as falls, contented when it chances to
be wholesome, and disgustingly, pusillanimously
sick when the fruit is bad.

Fixed as he must be in his own particular
social latitude and longitude, your neighbour
has nevertheless a new and abiding sense of
human things. Society seems to him like a vast
painting worked out by thousands of artists, to
each of whom a small section of the canvas has
been given without order of merit. If there was
any original cartoon, moreover, this has appar-
ently been lost or destroyed, and consequently
each artist has been compelled to fill his allotted
space according to his own ideas. As the natural

A DEFINITION OF HUMAN NATURE 45

result, the whole canvas represents an ordered
confusion, a mathematical distortion, a divine
inconsequence that strikes the beholder like the
supreme triumph of inspired nightmare. Of
course, if one looks at only one space at a time,
concentrating upon the successive environments
one by one, he always finds more or less harmony
and perfection. If you speak of confusion, he
takes you close to the painting, points out his
favourite section, and refutes you by a triumphant
silence ; if you suggest distortion, inconsequence,
he will offer to take you over the whole canvas,
proving by a profound critical study of each
section the highly admirable finality of Art.
Objecting to this method, however, and request-
ing him to step back and view the work as a
whole, it is very likely that he will consider you
a vandal capable of stealing Mona Lisa, or a
harmless fool who really never deserved a critic's
serious attention.

But we have not thought, suffered, or dreamed
our way to this point to accept the inconclusive
conclusion of the environment-mind. We cherish
the fearless, unchanging faith that, if order is not
now an attribute of human society, it is not in-
herently impossible to it ; if there is not now an

46 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

international equity, an inter-religious fraternity,
the human race has received no divine fiat
making them for ever unattainable. It was not
written on the stone tablets, nor spoken from the
Mount of Olives. Nor did Buddha authorize
any such negation in the philosophic East. By
the manhood and womanhood within us inter-
preting human life according to its own creative
instinct, we insist that there must be some true
perspective for the social picture ; some point of
view from which these numberless self-contradic-
tory, self-stultifying scenes already melt into a
perfect unity ; and that unity, we know, shall not
only contain a holy beauty, yet unimaginable, all
its own, but by some easy and natural meta-
physics will endow each of its component parts
with a vigour and delight totally unfelt by those
who see the parts unrelated to the whole. This we
know, and in our faith exulting beyond the reach
of discouragement, we seek this unique point of
view, this centre of unity, throughout the length
and breadth of the world.

Some experience at least, some emotional
reaction corresponding to this is responsible for
the Socialistic standpoint. It is a point of view
far more inclusive than that of religion as

A DEFINITION OF HUMAN NATURE 47

traditionally conceived, and certainly more firmly
based. It is the bitter or contemptuous foe of
orthodoxy, and its demands are too forceful to
be set aside, just as its influence is too general to
be resisted. To be quite beyond discouragement,
however, we must either have attained some
positive bliss which dares laugh at reason, or have
acquired some truth which no criticism can ever
refute or impair. Unreasonable happiness is a
state we have no desire to realize. Our happiness
must be more reasonable than reason itself, or we
want none of it. As all social evils have a
known cause which science and law conceivably
can remedy, we need only put into operation
the requisite agencies, and slowly but surely
the whole demoralizing tangle will straighten
out. Have we evolved a saving truth, then,
which is inexpugnable to experience ?

The method of this study, as already expressed,
consists in comparing two diametrically opposite
values in order to derive a third value reconciling
and including both. No philosophy can be ex-
ploded or modified until it has been permitted
complete opportunity of self-expression. As
long as either contestant in a debate retains part
of his argument unformulated he holds open a

48 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

road to victory; but with the whole argument
once delivered he has no further opportunity of
dealing with new facts, and has very likely thus
succeeded in controverting his own conclusions.
Passing to the other point of view, therefore,
does the religious type agree with the ideas just
expressed ? Is he daunted or baffled by them ?
Not in the least. He says that this philosophy
begins at the wrong end of life. He says that
man is not a helpless slave to material environ-
ment, not a lump of clay to be thumped and
moulded by the blind potters of the world ; but
by divine right the creator of his own destiny,
endowed with will-power to resist all material
and physical catastrophe, just as he possesses an
instinctive faith which, when called upon, can
elevate him above the reach of failure and pain.
He says that by laying our emphasis upon
environment we stupify our power to conquer
environment, and by transferring our efforts from
the soul to society we weaken that inward
spiritual activity which alone makes life worth
living, whose development, in fact, is the end
and aim of existence. While your Socialists and
agitators, he continues, are groaning about
poverty, consider the stern, sweet triumph many

A DEFINITION OF HUMAN NATURE 49

a weak man and woman has already achieved in
far more terrible adversity. Which is more
admirable ? One has only to examine the
results gained by so much restless running to
and fro. What is the end of it all ? The more
that is given the poor, the more they want.
Gaining an unexpected bodily comfort, they
have lost their old simplicity and poise. Gain-
ing a little of this world, they have lost their
own souls ! And the others too, the rich and
educated, are suffering from the same disease.
We are all worshipping at the strange shrines of
physical and intellectual perfection ; we raise an
altar to the unknown god whom we might as
well openly call the God of Pleasure while we
desert the ark of the covenant and raise impious
hands against the Crucified. We are winding a
rope of sand ; we are writing our eternal names
in water. We stoop over the world's dirty
carpet, pulling out the rotten threads and
weaving with them a new rug. How can the
new rug be any better than the old ? That
which was dark in the former will be dark in the
latter ; what was red will be red, and what was
pure white shall ever be pure all the strands
inherently unchanged by the mere process of

4

50 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

changing the design in which they are tied. A
weak man must be weak however buttressed
about by social regulations ; a vicious woman
will be vicious under democracy as under
monarchy ; while a pure soul can remain un-
dismayed in the lowest circle of blasphemous
hell the soul of man under Socialism, in short,
will continue to be the soul of man. But must
we be discouraged ? Must we resign ourselves
to an alternative either hopeless or unworthy ?
No! And the religious man speaks from the
great faith within him No ! We must simply
and utterly begin at the other end of life. We
must begin with the soul itself, and discipline it
to acquire or reveal powers over which the world
has no control. We must admit no compromise
between spirit and matter, between the man
and his environment. Once accepting Christ's
revelation of the soul's supreme sufficiency and
the world's supreme helplessness, once con-
secrating ourselves to the inward life of God,
and all our fears and vexations will cease. Aye,
the world shall have no more authority over us,
but this life will take its proper proportion in the
great eternal scheme as the training school of
souls, the battleground of right and wrong prep-

A DEFINITION OF HUMAN NATURE 51

aration, not finality ; possibility, not consumma-
tion. In a word, he concludes with the lingering
smile of wisdom in a word, that which makes
the social ideal both impossible and unworthy of
man is men is human nature.

The force of his conviction brings us his point
of view. Have we indeed begun at the wrong
end of life ? Are we really beyond discourage-
ment ? For already this philosophy has thrown
its disturbing shadow across our steady resolve.
We have met this revolutionizing factor before,
this human nature. In our efforts toward social
well-being, we have been thrown back time after
time by exasperating and apparently fatal ques-
tions of personality and disposition. We have
encountered a certain cross-grained contrariness
in men which resisted our sharpest saw of pro-
gress. Our combination of ideas could be relied
upon, but our association of men soon scattered
like autumn leaves. The ideal remained firm as
Gibraltar, but the individual followers dashed
blindly against one another in the stormy
Mediterranean of prejudice and jealousy below.
The religious man, therefore, merely gives a
definite form to a tendency we ourselves have
often observed in society ; has only allied to an

52 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

ancient ecclesiastical tradition an undoubted
instinct of the human soul. Certainly, if this
everyday flux of passions truly represents
human nature, we shall find it difficult to resist
the progress of that militant tradition across our
lives and institutions. We shall find it impos-
sible not to exchange, and gladly exchange, our
troubled vision of men for the calm purpose of
God. Little by little, as we follow our own
souls toward divine perfection, we shall first
relax, then release, our grasp upon outward
things ; and as eternity develops within us, like
a new body to cast off the old flesh, a new mind
to cast off the old thoughts, we shall hear the
mingled curses and cries of humanity as reveal-
ing their passion for inward liberty, not political
equality, for spiritual intensity, not material
opportunity ; and full of our own new happiness
and peace we shall leave the untroubled, glory-
filled cathedral of meditation for the roaring,
brutal market, bearing a simple story of love,
meekness, and sacrifice as balm for the broken
heart and the aching mind of man.

Here, then, we have the religious point of
view. Comparing it with the point of view
previously expressed, we see that neither is

A DEFINITION OF HUMAN NATURE 53

wrong in the sense that it can be successfully
denied or neglected. But, on the other hand,
both are wrong in the sense that both are so
narrow that they exclude as much truth as they
contain. It is the excluded truth that finally
damns a system, not the admixture of error the
system contains ; and from now on we must
endeavour to break down the fatal opposition
that sunders religion and social science. Will
Christianity absorb Socialism ? Will Socialism
(I use the term in the broadest sense as meaning
the whole movement for social amelioration)
will Socialism make use of Christianity ? What
will be the character of the new thing, ^Christian-
Socialism " (or " Socialized-Christianity ") ?

The common point at which they are compelled
to meet is human nature. If human nature
were what the saints and confessors say it is, and
be no more than they say it is, we should have to
reconcile ourselves to the eternal opposition of
world and spirit, with life necessarily unhappy,
and its only hope in the next world. Fortunately
for us, the orthodox definitions of human nature
are strict, narrow, and precise. The Church has
a definite psychology, while the modern psycho-
logy only exists as the unformulated impressions

54 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

of most men and women. It has not yet
brought forth a St. Augustine or Thomas a
Kempis to focus these various impressions into
one intense personal experience, and we accord-
ingly possess no authoritative psychology to
oppose to the orthodox definitions of human
nature. It will go hard with us, however, if, as
living men and women, we cannot evolve a few
definitions more acceptable to our reason. For
ourselves, we are conscious of helpless good far
more than triumphant evil, and unsuccessful
impulses toward self-control or self-expression, far
more than desperate but voluntary compacts
with hell.

What is human nature viewed in the clear
light of facts and events ? Is it an element
for ever fixed in relation to its own resources of
good and evil, or is it a substance socially capable
of gradual refinement and purification ? If only
a blunt yes or no be permitted, we should abso-
lutely accept the former estimate, and resolutely
reject the latter. That is, in seeking for the
ultimate point of responsibility, we had better
locate it, at all costs, in the individual soul rather
than in the environment. For we can find the
same dreary types of sin and shame repeated

A DEFINITION OF HUMAN NATURE 55

throughout every social arrangement from the
beginning of time. We can find, likewise, the
same inspiring types of truth, courage, and fidelity
exemplified in every conceivable political and
ecclesiastical order. The constructive mother
and the destructive harlot dwell side by side in
London as they dwelt in Athens ; the miser and
his brother the spendthrift save and scatter our
paper currency as they used the shell money of
the Indians. There is apparently no spiritual
improvement in society as a whole, but only one
same inevitable and fateful drama which Every-
man must play to the end. For, could we effect
a real social amelioration, we should eliminate
the destructive and vicious types, retaining only
the superior stock. We ourselves, in other
words, should be appreciably better than our
grandparents, which we certainly are not. But
now I suddenly recollect my objection to the
historical estimate of life. I suddenly recollect
that all human existence has been created in the
form of individual men and women ; and that our
only fair test of life and standard of the universe
is the experience of each man and woman, taken
separately, as a series of personal impressions last-
ing, with varying degrees of intensity, from birth

56 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

to death. I refused to be duped by the universal
deception we practise upon ourselves, of looking
out from our personal experience to some institu-
tion such as Church or State, and trying to
identify our own helplessness with its strength,
our own shame with its glory. Yet the first
time that the historical method was employed
as an argument I was temporarily convinced !

No, instead of watching the reappearance of
any type, good or bad, in the interminable pro-
cess of the generations, let us rather take one
type and follow its inward experience and fate.
We can choose any type or any number of
types, provided always that we take them one
at a time and study life through their own eyes.
In this way we shall learn human nature as it
actually exists in men and women like ourselves,
not as it is classified in the historical museum.

Take the harlot type. Emotional or economic
necessity compels a woman to give or sell herself
to men. As we see her, she is a creature sunken
or sinking into the slough of physical and mental
ruin, feverish or dull, desperate or apathetic, but
always approaching one terrible climax of dis-
solution. We might ask what she had been as
a child ; whether the harlot bears any distinctive

A DEFINITION OF HUMAN NATURE 57

temperamental indication by which she can be
recognized as potentially and necessarily a harlot,
even before actually becoming such. It would
be a reckless thinker who stated that there is
any indication of the kind. Among a thousand
ten-year-old girls which, or how many, will
become harlots ? We can agree, however, that
temptation will come to all, whether as unreason-
able emotion or compelling want, and that only
those few who cannot resist their particular
temptation will become harlots ; the great
majority will attain an unchallenged womanhood.
Comparing the former with each other, we may
find some common temperamental likeness
suggested between them all, an emotional
intensity bordering upon hysteria, an emotional
apathy approaching insensibility, some funda-
mental perversion of reason and will, or some
anaemia of mind and nerve. Can we accept any
or all of these conditions as unfailing indices of
prostitution ? If we do construct an index, we
must be prepared to find that every other woman
among the thousand will be indicated by it to
a greater or less degree. We will also find
among the acknowledged prostitutes some who
scarcely respond to our scale, but by the un-

58 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

answerable authority of nature were intended
to be happy wives and mothers. What con-
tradiction is this? The reply is easy: that
society brings a greater pressure to bear upon
some women than upon others ; that many
respected women would have succumbed had
they been exposed to the same early environ-
ment as the unfortunates ; and, conversely, that
many and many a prostitute would have realized
a useful and happy life had she received a little
more sympathetic attention or a little more
wholesome food. The "human nature" of
women, then, while differing according to
personality, sustains a general likeness which
authorizes us to derive a few conclusions. We
may compare it to an elastic, all-pervading sub-
stance continually subject to strain, which by
virtue of its strength and elasticity can resist
terrific pressure, but after receiving a certain
amount will recover no more, and will break or
assume a new, distorted form. That is, there
exists a temptation-point for womanhood, a com-
bination of poverty, loneliness, discouragement,
and desperation at which the individual must
choose between death and shame. I think that
such an analysis, far from making anyone think

A DEFINITION OF HUMAN NATURE 59

worse of human nature, fills one with reverent
awe, darkened by an overshadowing sorrow that
such a point should be allowed to exist. If only
a partial vindication for the individual woman
(yet vindicatory to an extent known only to the
few devoted and fearless students of the subject),
yet it is an absolute and eternal conviction of
society itself. It should create a deep sympathy
between women that earnest, constructive
sympathy which surviving soldiers feel for the
fallen, knowing that in such a hell of bullets
some must perish, and grateful that it was not
themselves.

I have selected one type, and suggested the
resemblances by which it is knit close to the
rest of humanity. In choosing the harlot type,
moreover, I have deliberately taken the form
of temptation which, while as common as any
and far severer than most, is nevertheless yielded
to proportionately less than any other. I have
deliberately taken the one so-called vicious type
whose viciousness to become operative must
stifle the most powerful natural instinct, and,
having done so, receives the least compensation
in return. In the compulsory sterilization of one
woman's passion the whole world is blackly

60 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

damned. But I have not yet touched the heart
of this matter, I have only cut a cross-section
of human nature, as it were, and pointed out the
fact that all its rings are concentric. I have
only suggested a similarity between people of
different and even antagonistic temperament,
but I shall now reveal a tremendous dis-
similarity, a sheer self-estrangement which exists
in every individual cleaving him from himself
like daylight and darkness, or like east and west.
Who was that proud and hateful man, that
selfish ruffian round whom suddenly there shined
a light from heaven, and who after three days of
fasting and blindness received a new sight and
a new nature ? The question carries us to the
very watch-tower of human nature ; it carries
us to religion and Christ ; the answer, that it
was the Saul who became St. Paul, brings Christ
and religion directly to us. For there could be
no better proof of Saul's desperate and vicious
nature than that even after conversion he was
feared by the Apostles ; there can be no better
proof of Paul's spiritual nature than his own
later life and influence. In seeking for this
religious or spiritual nature as a fact in our
human life, I need not confine myself to the

A DEFINITION OF HUMAN NATURE 61

strange environment Christ created about Him-
self in the men and women He passed among,
for our civilization has never lacked saints and
mystics, even in its darkest hour. We can dis-
cover this saintship and mysticism to-day, often
in those who have no knowledge of its ecclesias-
tical relation. But no man need accept for the
purposes of this discussion a condition of being
in which other men have lived and are living
to-day. He need only look within himself and
acknowledge the presence of two natures that
which he is, and that which he would sometimes
prefer to be. He knows more about the first
than the second ; it is thrust upon him, happily
or unhappily, every day of his life, and seems
as much more present and actual and inevitable
as his own home seems more present, actual,
and inevitable than the sunset hidden behind
a city's smoke. We need push the question no
further : it is enough to admit that ordinary
human nature is not a unity, but a division ; not
a simple, controllable substance, but two sub-
stances, each complex, interwoven and involved-
one firm and unchangeable, like the trees in
a forest ; the other soft and ephemeral, like the
light mist which the wind blows among the
trees.

62 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

Though most of us are thus divided, some
men have been united. Without discussing
the how and why of the fact, let us merely
examine these men after this inward unity, and
learn some idea of the new substance, so to
speak, which in them human nature has suddenly
become. Undoubtedly the first unusual attribute
we notice is joy, and, not like our happiness,
derived from unstable, ever-passing combinations
of health, environment, self-gratification, success,
and the weather riot at all like this, but some-
thing assured, self-deriving, or self-renewing,
independent of all outward circumstances, and
as integral a part of the possessor as his heart
or brain. How can this be ? How can it be
that whereas with our happiness familiarity
breeds contempt and taste leads to repletion
and antipathy, this other happiness falls in love
with itself, as it were, and by self-consumption
is ever increased and intensified? Yet there
is no doubt of its existence, no question of its
actual possession of these strange qualities. What
other attribute can we discover in such men?
Why surely, a faith and stedfastness unalterable,
and a burning desire to influence the personal
lives of other men. Now, are we going to resign

A DEFINITION OF HUMAN NATURE 63

ourselves for ever to our own unsatisfactory
nature, or rather natures, while witness to so
desirable a nature in men originally no better
than we? At least, let us form a working
hypothesis and then apply it to our own case.

In some people there seems to exist, or be
acquired, another set of organs, a different centre
of activity. A spiritual nature seems to be born
within them like a butterfly in its chrysalis, as
different from mind as mind is from body ; and
this does not always come about through the in-
fluence of a greater personality, but through the
man's own desire to reconcile the two natures
within him. From all evidence and from our
own experience or instinct we are convinced that
spirituality comes from our ideal and unattained
self. But is it merely a superior physical health
or a clearer intelligence ? Is it one or both of
these, or something quite new and dissimilar ?

As an athlete might cast a glance of pity on
the invalid sitting motionless in the sun, or as the
eager scholar might turn unhappily away from a
dullard having no thought of the universe beyond
his little environment and his brief day like
these, but with far deeper and broader compassion
the spiritual man sees the weakness and blindness

64 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

of the spiritually invalid. To him, his spirituality
is the source of all his existence. It courses
through his body like a torrent of warm, vitaliz-
ing blood, rousing the tired heart to youthful
exuberance and his limbs to the lightness of a
fawn. It steeps his mind like the sun in Italian
gardens, drawing a radiant colour and lingering
perfume from each thought, and inspiring
emotions jubilant as the thrush among the trees.
He knows and he knows by the same unanswer-
able conviction of the athlete who knows his own
strength, or the scholar who knows his own
intelligence he knows that he has come into
possession of a new nature. He knows that this
new nature, this spiritual self, far from being the
reaction from clean blood or clear brain, is the
source of their richest energy. He feels his
sluggish, unhealing blood demanding new, vital
nourishment, his tired brain suddenly calling for
more and profounder materials. A new centre
of sensation has developed within him, at once
swifter and more responsive than the old the
conflux of mind and body with a new current.
The joy that he had in physical activity becomes
tenfold, as if he were hurrying to greet a friend ;
and his thoughts grow passionately interesting,

A DEFINITION OF HUMAN NATURE 65

each one the key to a supreme secret. But
deeper and stronger dawns the realization that
body and mind have found their purpose and
their sustenance. The body carries him from
bower to bower of Nature's paradise ; the mind
brings him glimpse after glimpse of a holy ador-
able Presence.

But is this new activity accidental, intermittent,
contingent ? Far otherwise. He knows at last
that always, even in his most painful or unhappy
day, it had been spirit which he had really prayed
for, not health, will-power, or good fortune. In so
far as spirit had been present within him, he had
ever found comfort in weakness and courage in
despair ; but to the degree that soul had been
wanting, stifled by the ignorant or unready mind,
he had been both hopeless and condemned,
judged and punished. But now, attaining
spiritual activity, his life has become one strong
current of power, joy and accomplishment.
Trials ? misfortunes ? so many wheels the river
turns as it flows, undelayed and unweakened.
Sickness ? death ? Oh yes, but the bird sings
elsewhere when this wood hears it no more the
poet's creative power seizes upon a new subject
when the completed poem has been sent abroad.

5

66 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

Had Shakespeare felt this radiant, self-assured
spirituality, he would have left us great impulses
toward happiness instead of eternal phrases of
regret; had Milton's faith been undarkened by
the perverted moral consciousness of his gener-
ation, we should have looked upon no " Paradise
Lost," but the primal Eden sown eternally for all
men and women ; and Napoleon would have
bequeathed no Waterloo to breed the all-poison-
ing snake of modern armed peace, but a united,
inspired France, like another Athens, to inflame
the world.

One might grant so much yet remain un-
satisfied. The acquisition of this spiritual nature
may be dependent on temperament ? Practical,
everyday people are excluded ? Only he is ex-
cluded from this attainment who never felt a
different nature hovering over his common nature,
a new desire bursting like a strange flower within
the garden of his dreams. For the soul's pre-
dominance acts like the authority of a captain,
bringing obedience to many rebellious impulses
and unity to many discordant powers. It gathers
all the physical and intellectual faculties into a
beautiful, efficient synthesis. It realizes all the
occasional aspirations by one symmetrical, poised

A DEFINITION OF HUMAN NATURE 67

faith. It makes every personality a rare posses-
sion, valuable to the world. The fisherman's
simplicity it makes Peter's reverence, and from
Saul's rancour it moulds the ardour of Paul. It
removes the cause for jealousy and hate by trans-
ferring desire from the flux of people and things
to the steadfast mountain of holiness. Personal-
ity becomes a delight, which had been a burden ;
individuality becomes a treasure, which had been
a curse.

But, if attainable, is spirituality socially desir-
able ? Does it not deprive humanity of a man,
and the State of a citizen ? Can a man serve two
masters ? This indictment is apparently warranted
by the world's experience with holy men and
mystics. Spiritual activity has driven men into
deserts and monasteries. And the men of greatest
faith have ever attempted to turn our minds from
this world to another. Once again, however,
history will provide argument for one side as
potent as for the other, and we must here trust
to our own increasing knowledge of the soul.
Yet what inner truth or instinct can reconcile
the useless self-torture of St. Simon with the
devoted public ministry of St. Catherine of Siena ?
Does the spiritual life effect one temperament

68 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

one way, but another temperament the opposite
way ? Surely not ! And by comparing the
activity of the two natures within ourselves, we
can interpret every apparent contradiction and
exception. The brutish hermit, the fierce ascetic,
have been deceived by the overwhelming moral
perversity of their age, or (which is more likely),
have not really attained the spiritual life. For
the desire for this inward sanctification and
happiness will drive to madness or to ethical
crime those who are aware of their soul's possi-
bility, but who are tortured by their apparent
inability to realize it. Ignorant of the true
method of operation, they gladly scarify the
physical and intellectual being in the conviction
that passion and reason negate or destroy
spirituality. Should spirituality come to them,
by reason of their intense desire and despite their
desperate error, they realize too late how uselessly
they have deprived the soul of its faithful servants
and messengers. But even at such cost they
never regret. On the other hand, when spiritual
activity is fully awakened in a man, he approaches
society more closely, and serves the State with
greater zeal. He finds his true happiness in
service, and will not solicit from men the recom-

A DEFINITION OF HUMAN NATURE 69

pense already abundantly bestowed by his
Creator. He does not crave celibacy nor require
it, but if the divine accident of love reveal to him
the mate his psychic and physical incompleteness
has awaited, he discovers in marriage the primal
mystery and sacrament of life. Nakedness and
innocence become identified as one indivisible
quality, and love the mutual rendering of one
divine gift. The flaming sword of shame lowers
for these two ; they find Eden everywhere about
them, and in parenthood restore to their children
the golden age. And stronger even than this
sacrament is the sacrament of the forgiveness of
sin. All the long-festering centres of hateful,
shameful thought and memory, spreading a
subtle and paralyzing infection through his
consciousness, instantly heal and disappear. The
mind receives them back into its own cosmic
infinity, and the individual returns to sin no
more. Then, as a strong man recovering from
wasting sickness feels returning his rightful
mastery over the limbs ; as, gradually but surely,
his body loses its terrible weight, and he no longer
need exert a reluctant will-power to raise head
and arm ; so increase of spiritual health gives
complete control over the moral nature. The so-

70 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

called virtues, once onerous, are become easy ;
morality reveals itself as opportunity, not duty.
Spiritualized human nature expresses its natural
power and joy through the virtues, as the athlete
expresses his strength by means of exercises and
games. Each virtue and grace of life becomes
in its turn a means for self-expression goblets
in which the soul may pour its rare and fragrant
wine.

The grimly conscientious and the sceptical
have probably long ago thrown down this exult-
ing page ; yet if curiosity, not approval, retain
their attention still, I shall gladly answer the
indignant question that now breaks from their
lips. If this be true, they say (it should be
remarked that puritan and freethinker put the
same question), if such joy, steadfastness, and
power can be derived from a spiritual activity
free to all men and women, how about them?
And they point to the passing crowd. Yes, I
repeat, what about them ? Are they essentially
different from those multitudes who heard
Christ, and believed, and went on their way
rejoicing ? Have they less inherent capacity for
spiritual living? I firmly believe that they
possess far more. Then why do they not believe

A DEFINITION OF HUMAN NATURE 71

also, and rejoice ? The reply is easier and
simpler than might be thought possible. We
have only to pause, however, each in his own
place, and for a moment seriously consider the
social order, its ideal, its operation, and its effect
upon the individual. But since, if we consider it
from no special point of view, with no special
inquiry in our minds, the world will seem merely
a great spectacle which, including all kinds and
conditions, apparently emphasizes no particular
kind and condition, nor apparently authorizes
any deduction from facts which cannot be
sterilized by a diametrically opposite deduction,
also from facts since this is so, let us deliber-
ately take one point of view for our outlook upon
society, and let us formulate one particular ques-
tion which society must answer. Our point of
view must be supremely vital ; therefore it shall
be that of the relations of the individual, who-
ever and wherever he is the point of view, that
is, of you and me and every other man and
woman taken separately and one at a time. This
is the only natural point of view, since it is the
one that life itself thrusts equally upon all. But
our question, also, must be supremely and
universally important ; therefore it shall be this :

72 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

What effect does the present social order inherently
and inevitably have upon our spiritual develop-
ment ?

Spiritual attainment, as we have seen, consists
in the transference of our centre of consciousness
from one being this common being which
others think of when they think of us to
another being ; that ideal nature we sometimes
think of all alone, when our solitude is inspired
by some uncontrollable passion of love or sorrow.
It consists in hurling ourselves across an inward
chasm and becoming different men. It consists
in effecting a change in ourselves so radical and
permanent, that after the change we can look
upon our former nature as the bird looks upon
the broken shell from which it came, as the
butterfly looks upon the chrysalis to which it
need never return. But society tolerates no
such changes. Whatever the optimist say, or
the glorious exceptions seem to prove, our social
arrangement is inherently, inevitably and alto-
gether opposed to the spiritualization of human
nature. Its opposition may not be conscious or
intentional, but none the less it is diabolically
effective. People, as men and women, may not
hinder, but encourage us to attain our ideal

A DEFINITION OF HUMAN NATURE 73

nature ; but people as society fling over every
soul the confining chains of duty and habit, even
as the gods bound the aspiring Titon (" Fore-
sight ") to the sheer rock and laid open his breast
to the vulture. Spiritual attainment is not the
mysterious nor tremendously difficult task its
rareness would seem to imply. It is not so
difficult as the development of an athlete from
the ordinary lover of sports ; it is not so
mysterious as the development of a scholar from
the ordinary lover of knowledge. The process is
simpler and swifter, its apparatus less expensive.
Men have only to realize that the tidal wave
of power rolling momentarily across their char-
acters in the presence of a great event like battle,
a great personality like the orator, a great emo-
tion like love that this power is not lent to
them by the outward event or personality, but
is the effect of their own spiritual nature recog-
nizing its own attributes in the mirror of the
world's glory. It is they who bring greatness to
the event, not the event which brings greatness
to them. They must realize, moreover, that
such power, steadfastness, and joy is a transient
climax, like the crest of the wave, only when
registered and considered by their lesser nature ;

74 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

but that when registered by their spiritual nature
it is known to be an attribute of self, and there-
fore a permanent state of being. One has only
to go back and recollect as clearly as possible
what passed through his mind at such a time ;
he will perceive, like a faded map, a character
totally superior to his present character, a world
of labour and men quite different from this
world. That map or chart of the spiritual self is
faded now, and it will continue to grow dimmer
and less believable as he leaves the great crisis
behind ; yet in that hour it was outlined more
clearly than the constellations, in figures more
intensely brilliant than the sun. Every con-
scious being can draw from his own memory at
least one impulse which, if followed, would have
led him to the spiritual life. No human soil is
so unhallowed that it does not contain at least
one fragment of self-perfection. By this frag-
ment, though it be broken and marred like the
statue of some ancient divinity, the god is re-
covered to the imagination and the will.

But what blots out the map of attainment ?
what barbarism overthrows the shining acropolis
of perfection ? Once more I seriously desire
every man to answer for himself, out of his own

A DEFINITION OF HUMAN NATURE 75

convincing experience. Let him return to the
momentary vision and impulse and learn what
malignant demon of commonplaceness stole it,
like a sunrise, for ever away. He will perceive
that some social duty too quickly intervened
between himself and his creative passion, dis-
tracting him into attention of outward things,
and that he saw nothing in these outward things
to correspond to the necessity of his dream, so
that gradually he came to doubt its existence or
at least its practicability. But if he be more
tenacious, if he will not yield so easily to outer
influence, he will also perceive that society has
made no available provision for this new nature,
either to produce or develop it, and hence he, too,
like the iron heated and then neglected by the
smith, will cool once more, his form and temper
unchanged. Here, indeed, lies the dark secret
of the world's unhappiness : that in neglecting to
provide for the soul, society has not made the
mistake of the jeweller who substitutes alloy for
gold ; it makes the far more consequential error
of the sword-maker who tries to fashion a blade
of cold iron. The exceptional personality, more-
over, who derives his course of action from inner
necessity and not from outer suggestion, on

76 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

cherishing this new, mysterious impulse and
releasing its activity to its culmination in the
successful spiritualization of his nature, he must
then undergo the ultimate tragedy, the Golgotha
of the religious life, realizing at last that our
social order, the prematurely-lauded arrangement
of a " free Church within a free State," effectively
prevents him from expressing himself adequately
in terms of service to his fellow-men.

Here, in fact, lies the truth excluded by the
religious psychology. It has not at all taken
into account the soul's need of self-expression
through mind and body, with all the social com-
plications which that involves. The Christian psy-
chology, in other words, takes it for granted that
the soul expresses itself only through prayer and
praise, or through other means equally personal
and innocuous. It is only when the modern
Christian, who differs from the monk and priest
by his sense of human fellowship it is only when
the modern Christian attempts to carry his
vision into practice, that he sees the fatal error
religion has made in permitting or compelling
society to develop its governmental activity apart
from its spiritual life. For government, by which
I mean the social structure in its broadest sense,

A DEFINITION OF HUMAN NATURE 77

must be realized to be the collective expression
of human souls ; and as such to possess an all-
powerful influence over our spiritual life. Human
nature, then, is too complex and inclusive a
substance to be independent either of religion or
social science. In the daily experience of every
man and woman they meet and blend, though
society itself is organized upon their intense
hostility. But since our human nature can, and
must, reconcile them, it will not be long before
society reconciles them also. Part III., accord-
ingly, will study this latter aspect of the problem,
and show how society is already instinctively
attempting to unite them, with an inquiry into
the nature of the social structure that will result.

PART III

THE NEW SOCIAL SYNTHESIS

Ill

OUR nature, broadly speaking, maintains social
self-expression through two different sets of
institutions the Church and the State. While
Church and State truly represent the ideas of their
members ; while they truly are a projection of
our natures upon the material world, like a well-
fitting garment, they are either unfelt or felt only
as a source of comfort and pleasure. Grounding
ourselves upon the firm basis that Church and
State no longer fulfil our needs and desires, we
can readily perceive wherein each one is a misfit,
and how both are rapidly altering so as to
conform to that mould and pattern every man
bears within himself.

Of our social existence, we have stated one
unchallenged fact, that it is a constant defence
against personal calamity a truceless warfare
and a peril unremoved. Every man and woman,
in every environment, at all times, banquets (or

81 6

82 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

starves !) at the world's table under an impend-
ings word. Virtue secures a man only partial
immunity ; health and wealth are mighty shields
that protect only a little of one's individual
integrity. With a rapidity that leaves us in-
different, a multiformity that leaves us resigned,
disaster and misfortune sickness, poverty, grief,
helplessness make out their daily bulletins of
defeat ; and we, the lucky survivors of to-day's
proscription, may well wonder what sentence the
morrow will pass upon our lives. We know too
clearly that it is neither our virtue nor intelligence
which has given us such respite, for more admir-
able unselfishness, courage, and wit fell among
the earliest victims. No. Standing one story
higher than the superstitious or passionate mob
which attributes every catastrophe either to
implacable fate or to some wanton human tyrant
now propitiating Moloch, now beheading King
Louis standing one story higher than the
crowded streets, we have long ago discovered
the comparative impotence of any individual to
accomplish good, and the comparative innocence
of any individual in accomplishing evil. We see
that evil and misfortune are inherent in the
inequable social structure ; that the streets of

THE NEW SOCIAL SYNTHESIS 83

our political and economic order are too narrow
and tortuous to pass the human population
without crushing many, without bruising, dis-
turbing, and endangering all. Slowly, like the
features of a landscape under a lifting fog, appear
to us the true direction and extent of this peril
to which we are exposed, and, for a fundamental
axiom of social life, a law applicable to every
environment and to any age, we derive this
statement of fact : the danger to which any man
is exposed at any moment is a danger to all men
at that same point of time.

What does this solemn warning mean ? It
does not at all mean that when one house catches
fire the whole town must be consumed ; it does
not at all mean that when an epidemic breaks
out, or a financial panic ensues, every citizen
will be infected or every business destroyed.
But it means this : that the possibility of fire
lurks over every building alike, and that just
previous to any conflagration, all owners share
potentially in the risk of loss the fact which
every insurance company is firmly established
upon ; and it means that when typhoid poisons
the public water or milk supply, your family and
your neighbours suffer the same peril of death.

84 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

If he dies, you have no special merit, and have
survived this ordeal, perhaps, only to sink with
an overloaded pleasure steamer the next summer,
or perish in a railroad accident the next week.

That is its meaning, and the proof of the
axiom can be further derived by every man from
his own experience. But immediately upon
stating the law and taking its implication to
our own existence immediately upon recog-
nizing and naming the implacable foe by which
all men are threatened ruin a new hope, sane
and sweet and strong as a May morning, rises
over this desperate darkness and uncovers a
garden in the very arctics of seedless snow. For
the fact that one fire no longer involves a city
implies that a successful system of prevention
has been devised. It implies, moreover, that
the system is public and free, never withheld
from any man's need on account of his poverty,
his politics, his race, or his morals. It implies
that in this matter of fire men recognize and
act upon the fact that the safety of all is the
safety of each. The fanatic cannot prevent the
fire department from saving an atheist's office
building, nor the Conservative divert the water
from the Liberal's barn. Above all, they would

THE NEW SOCIAL SYNTHESIS 85

not if they could. Likewise, the fact than an
epidemic no longer destroys the entire popula-
tion argues an active scientific system of pre-
vention and cure. A few cases reveal the
disease ; the alarm goes abroad, our modern
machinery of hygiene is put into operation, and
beyond a few victims the epidemic has no power
to interrupt our social continuity. This fact
in itself is too commonplace to arouse our
enthusiasm or gratitude now ; yet it suggests
much, for even as I write I can turn to my
window and see the towers of a medieval city,
where, in the year 1348, the plague carried off
nearly 80,000 members of a population number-
ing not more than 100,000 souls. The modern
man, I am sure, if confronted by a similar
catastrophe, would prefer death to survival with
such a melancholy or desperate fraction. Life
would become too terrible, far more contemptible
than death, given or withdrawn, nourished or
denied, according to a blind chance, with all
God's privilege of existence apparently subject
to a fortune more hateful than the gambler's
wheel. But our comparative immunity from
epidemic supplies the same deduction as our
comparative immunity from fire that society

86 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

has come to acknowledge and act upon the fact
that the safety of all is the safety of each.

I have chosen obvious examples ; I might as
easily have selected cases of intellectual or
spiritual misfortune. The shaft of this inquiry
can be driven into a man's most personal and
(so-considered) private relations, those relations
even more important in their effect upon
efficiency and well-being than his economic and
political relations; and each typical example,
on every plane of human existence, would repeat
and further emphasize the inexpugnable social
law: that the danger to one is a danger for all;
that the only safety effectual for the one is the
safety available for all. For there are many
terrible misfortunes happening but seldom, that
are seldom mentioned when known, which exist
in the structure of society, nevertheless, like a
virulent serpent hidden under a stone. Are
there women to whom marriage brings an
indescribable horror of agony and shame ;
children to whom life can only mean the slow
punishment for crimes committed long before
they were born ? Are there productive intelli-
gences neglected, willing labourers denied work ?
Are there children overworked or starved into

THE NEW SOCIAL SYNTHESIS 87

viciousness by nasty food ? Is there anywhere,
in any person's experience, one damnable social
injustice or calamity, then as surely as the one
sun lights us all it threatens you and me. Every
man and woman ought at least once to face
squarely and intelligently the more apparent
facts about our social life. Every fool's paradise
of shallow optimism, ignorance, or sloth, will be
destroyed and its dwellers thrust miserably forth.
And since this is so, we discover a new relation-
ship binding every man to his fellows. It can
best be explained by analogy.

The human body is equipped with nerves in
every part, whose function is to register every
danger to the central intelligence. The organism
as a whole depends upon each minutest nerve for
its information about environment. The finger-
tip in detecting heat and cold may be the means
of saving the body. It is not a matter of the
relative importance of finger-tip and brain ; it
is a matter of their absolute interdependence.
The greatest harm that the eye could bring to
the body would be merely to omit its warning ;
and if the hands cannot or will not register pain
the arms may be broken. But so it is with
society ; each man's experience of life is a test

88 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

by which we can tell whether the social environ-
ment is favourable or adverse to human exist-
ence. Each man is a nerve which must register
its sensations within the central controlling
intelligence. For as one nerve or one sense
cannot serve to adjust body to environment,
neither can one man or set of men legislate for
society. We must each study our personal experi-
ence in the light of a great ideal, and then
demand as our right from society the immediate
alleviation of shameful, confining, and despiritual-
izing conditions.

Another axiom may now be laid down : that
every class and group must be fairly represented
in legislation to insure the social integrity on which
the well-being of all classes and groups depend.
For the misrepresentation or uiirepresentation of
any social element is merely a drugging of the
nerves that register the condition of some vital
organ. To inconvenience and oppress labour,
accordingly, is equivalent to burdening the social
heart ; and likewise to neglect our poets and
artists is equivalent to distorting our social vision.

Rebellion on the part of any class, accordingly,
reveals the presence of an ill by which the whole
organism is infected. It is not a desperate and

THE NEW SOCIAL SYNTHESIS 89

dangerous attempt to subvert " law and order,"
but the holy and invaluable attempt to secure the
general health. There are no inherently opposed
classes, but only classes unadjusted to the social
equilibrium. With these facts in mind, we
possess the only fair criterion with which to judge
all contemporary social wars, especially the daily
contest between capital and labour.

Within the traditional State organization for
establishing and confirming the rights of men
there have arisen a thousand lesser instruments,
as we have seen, each smaller yet sharper than
the sword of State. We have found that the
national organization does very well for vast
operations like war, but for minor injuries for
child-labour, for sweated women, for the propa-
gation of a universal language, for tax reform and
scores of revolutionary activities more the
private or semi-official association provides a
surgeon's knife better adapted to the purpose.
All the more severe existing social evils, as we
have seen, are inspiring determined propaganda of
reform. In other words, the drugged and long
stupefied nerves of society have begun finally to
register their agony within the central intelligence,
and body and mind to co-operate at last for their

90 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

mutual balance and health. The life-blood pour-
ing out to every atrophied member is this same
passion for rights the intelligence directing the
operation of social revitalization is our growing
recognition of the fact that immunity can be
secured for one man only by securing it for all.
What is most needed now, therefore, as we
plainly see, is a better co-ordination between
the various agencies of reform, and some closer
and more active sympathy between politics and
social science. A man can be wholeheartedly
loyal to only one organization ; he demands,
accordingly, that the energy he supplies to this
particular movement shall not prove hostile and
nugatory to the energy his neighbour is supplying
to another movement equally necessary for the
common weal. He does not want, by founding
or supporting a society for tax revision, for
example, to set in motion some devious political
reaction which shall affect opposition to women's
suffrage. At the present time, unfortunately, he
is certain to create some such reaction ; and he
finds every public service an alley in a labyrinth of
politics and class jealousy, intentionally complex
to hold that much-dreaded minotaur, human
nature.

THE NEW SOCIAL SYNTHESIS 91

But we know that men have assembled a mass
of social information undreamed of a century
ago a body of facts and working theories, driven
by a great ideal, which transcends the information
at the disposal of the authors of the American
Constitution as completely as their information
transcends the social science of an African village.
We know that all the elements needed for a new
political synthesis have been assembled and put
into solution ; and that, half-felt by the ordinary
man, a new public ideal is undergoing the travail
of definition and conscious acceptance.

It will readily be granted that institutions
survive only by continuing to prove advantageous
to men. If the American Constitution, for
example, should ever become as useless as the
feudal system, it will pass into respectable but
unlamented oblivion. The only question consists
in whether, under any circumstances, a national
organization such as England, Germany, or the
United States, as we now understand them, could
ever lose its utility.

When the intra-national societies such as
those for tax reform or the prevention of child-
labour have accomplished their purpose, they
automatically go out of existence, and their

92 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

members are freed for their original allegiance to
Church and State. The lesser synthesis merges
naturally into the greater, and the driving force
impelling the smaller organization is quietly
liberated for the service of the greater. Is there
any larger synthesis, now nameless and undefined,
into which the national States could similarly
melt, thus releasing their tremendous forces to
the use of a more efficient machine ? Perhaps
we are developing the argument too rapidly.

To return to the original point of departure,
then, let us inquire once more whether a national
organization could ever conceivably lose its reason
for existence a fair question, surely, to which not
even a crown prince could object. A very large
part of its reason for existence unquestionably
consists in the power to protect its population.
Does the modern State really protect? How
foolish ! The question, however, is only too well
advised. At this very moment the natives of
Berlin and the natives of London more than
vaguely believe that they may suddenly find them-
selves in open and deadly war. Are those people
so hostile, those two cities so violently and in-
herently opposed, that war is necessary and
unavoidable ? Not at all. The danger of war

THE NEW SOCIAL SYNTHESIS 93

does not exist in the individuals of either race
(taken separately), nor in the political synthesis
we call a city ; it exists only in the larger syn-
thesis we call the State. That is, whereas the
Germans and the English are sympathetic on the
personal basis, and are mutually tolerant when
taken city by city, they are prepared, as Germany
and England, to shock and injure the whole
civilized world. Or, to carry the deduction one
step further, some two hundred millions of people
are thrust to the utter verge of unnecessary,
undesired warfare by that same political organi-
zation by which each citizen implicitly believes
his life and property are defended.

Could England and Germany be dissolved
into a synthesis larger than either and including
both, this fateful war-cloud would instantly
become a very harmless mass of smoke and
vapour. Could they be united in some larger
political unit, as London and Chester or Massa-
chusetts and Virginia are united, they would
incur as little risk of war as two cities of one
kingdom or two states in one federation. Is
such a larger unit impossible ; such a new
synthesis incredible ? But sixty years ago
Massachusetts and Virginia were at desperate

94 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

war ; and only a few centuries farther back
London and Chester were capitals of rival
kingdoms ! Prophecy always seems so other-
worldly and unpractical until it is recognized to
be merely this common old highway of human
history laid out a few miles ahead ! On the
other hand, the determined patriot (the man who
will be loyal and brave, and never give up the
ship though he sink the crew) the determined
nationalist may argue that international peace
may be secured without altering our present
political syntheses. For he can truly assert that
since in every civilized country there exists a
strong peace movement, its effects will be gained
for humanity by working separately upon each
State ; by merely passing a few new laws through
each Senate, Parliament, Reichstag, or whatever
the national legislative assembly may be called.
But let us extend this apparently innocent pro-
cess a little further, and then see what effect it
has upon the present political situation. I
objected to a government a moment ago because,
instead of protecting life and property, it actually
threatens both by a terrible international war
by a war, moreover, against a people who hate
neither its individuals nor have any desire to

THE NEW SOCIAL SYNTHESIS 95

control their property, but who only hate
(because they have good reason to fear) that
particular political unit in which these lives and
their property cohere. Suppose that I object to
the present form of representative government
on the grounds that it does not represent, that it
voluntarily subjects half the population to
political serfdom and impotence ? This objec-
tion is valid as can be. Civil war has been
reaped a thousand times from a far smaller field !
But which half? the patriot stammers, somewhat
daunted. The feminine half, the mother half, I
answer. And before the unconvinced Adam in
him recovers sufficiently to grumble about a
paradise the women once lost for us all, I
continue with my reasons for desiring women's
suffrage.

The fact that women hold property and pay
taxes, and should therefore have some control
over its political status, I pass over as for Anglo-
Saxons, at least, too patent for insistence. I
omit all discussion, also, of the fact that since
women, as workers, have been drawn perilously
near the economic buzz saw, they should be
given the same power as men to regulate its
mutilating activity. I put the question on its

96 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

broadest human basis : that in women society
possesses a magnificent creative and conservative
force, never so necessary for our common well-
being as now, but wantonly wasted for lack of
the adequate means for self-expression. More
than half the educative, the spiritualizing, even
the directive instinct of the human race belongs
to the feminine, not the masculine, nature.
Being more important than the individual man
for the propagation and rearing of the species,
the individual woman is by nature endowed with
a greater momentum of vitality and energy. In
every environment where more work must be
done than can be accomplished by the men,
women reveal this inherent power. The pioneer's
wife labours as hard, and as efficiently, as the
pioneer. But modern society, having attempted
to relieve the woman's burden of drudgery by
invention, has succeeded so well as to deprive a
large class of every duty and responsibility save
those pertaining to sex. The woman's vast store
of initiative and energy has been crowded into
that one narrow, confining channel, so that
instead of Andromache, mate and begetter of
heroes, we are doing our best to evolve a
passionate, irresponsible and destructive being,

THE NEW SOCIAL SYNTHESIS 97

dependent, useless, unhappy, hunted, and flattered
while despised by men.

The woman's movement, then, whatever its
immediate goal, for its ultimate purpose has no
less an ideal than the re-establishment of a free,
noble, constructive womanhood, a state of being,
not merely a political and economic condition.
But this womanhood can be recovered from the
vitiating influence of Paris fashions and the
confining influence of household service only by
first recovering for the individual woman her
social responsibility, then her economic freedom,
and last of all her particular public task, whether
educative, legislative, judicial, or professional.
The modern woman must do a so-called man's
work in the world as the only alternative to
doing a servant's work or a doll's work. But
this is no hardship ; in intelligent activity, in
equal responsibility lies the free, glad use of her
natural power ; and the professional woman of
to-day is restoring not only the old, profound
happiness of women, but also their constructive
vision of human life, their deliberate, conscious
and effective reaction from adverse social condi-
tions, and consequently their real fitness for
motherhood. Otto Weiniger's cry, hysterical

7

98 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

but intense, insane but sincere, against the
destructive influence of women on the in-
tellectual and spiritual life, must assume its
proper place as a protest against the doll- woman
and her eternal mate, the licentious man. For
men do not strongly enough appreciate this fact
about sex ; that the more it is emphasized in the
destiny of women, the more it must be em-
phasized in the destiny of men. A distorted
sexual self-consciousness in either sex provokes
a like self-consciousness in the other. Woman-
hood is the only mirror in which manhood can
discover its own most heroic stature and divinest
features ; a true, entire man, likewise, is the only
measure by which a proud and aspiring woman
can estimate her own worth. By freeing the
woman, therefore, we will free the man ; and it
must be understood that in this matter of sex
the ideal for which humanity should strive is not
that its activity should merely be controllable, as
if it were a bad temper or an expensive indul-
gence, but that it should be unconscious, like the
clean, powerful impulse for food and sleep.

As men, our attitude toward the subject is
neither unpractically idealistic nor disinterestedly
heroic, but both utilitarian and selfish. As

THE NEW SOCIAL SYNTHESIS 99

citizens of a government whose social necessities
exceed its political control, we should object to
the perpetual irresponsibility of half the popula-
tion, especially when we learn from history that
this half is essentially helpful and constructive
when made responsible, but essentially destruc-
tive and dangerous when allowed or compelled
to relapse into barbarous individualism. We
should demand, for the common good, that
women be civilized as rapidly as possible that
each one be compelled to stand outside her
prehistoric cave of home, and to train herself
for public service and public duty. As human
beings of the masculine gender, moreover, we
should strongly object to being surrounded by
women who look to men for a mere living, not
for a glorious life; who for board and lodging
are willing to accept men as they are, without
daring insist upon their transformation into
superior, knightly beings ; but, like needy ser-
vants, feel themselves very often obliged to
endure their position at all costs. Let us demand
for our own good as well as the common welfare,
that women be compelled to realize how degrad-
ing to both members, and to their children, such
a marriage must be. The women must learn

100 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

to insist upon some heroic test, to be expressed
either in action or in personality, as the one sure
proof of love in men, and by exalting and
purifying their nature, lead them to require that
the women correspondingly exalt and purify
their own. A marriage without such mutually-
inspiring and mutually-revering influence is, to
say the least, a mistake ; but to speak plainly, it
is a hideous degradation and sin.

When we refer the feminist propaganda to the
national form of government, we observe that
the modern political unit is far too small to
control the movement. It is more important for
a rich woman in New York to assist the political
agitation of her fellow-women in London than
to contribute in any way to a government which,
by continuing as long as possible the tradition of
war for men and domesticity for woman, con-
stitutes a potent hostility to human advance ; it
is more important for an intelligent woman in
Washington to educate the girls of Persia than
to help the poor of her own neighbourhood.
Realizing these facts at the same time that she
realizes the necessity for a nobler womanhood
and manhood, she perceives that her highest
social loyalty absolutely transcends the State,
and belongs to her sex all over the world.

THE NEW SOCIAL SYNTHESIS 101

But we admit that in time even the blind and
obstructive political organization will legalize the
new status of women. Does this prove that
the national State is a permanent political syn-
thesis ? Let us carry the same reasoning through
all modern activities for reform. The Socialists
of Italy, Germany, France, and Spain, similarly
find their interests opposed by the national
government, but defended and furthered by an
international organization. They know that the
national boundary-line does not confine class any
more that it confines sex ; but that the ramifica-
tions of their economic inequality extend over
all Europe. The weight of the Socialistic
influence, accordingly, is thrown for the inter-
national, not the national organization, and their
influence unquestionably constitutes the greatest
modern impetus for arbitration and peace. Ad-
mitting as before, however, that the better part
of Socialism will eventually pass into national
legislation, nevertheless, since justice and equality
are conditions that cannot be copyrighted nor
taxed, the legal status of the working man in
Italy will become practically the same as that of
an English or German labourer ; and the legal
status of the American woman, likewise, will

102 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

become practically the same as that of the
women in Europe.

But what must be the obvious result upon the
different national organizations ? Just this : that
each government, in responding to the common
internal irresistible popular pressure for reform,
will gradually approach every other national
government, until, when that pressure has worked
itself out in terms of law, the States will have
become so nearly identical in spirit and purpose,
if not in detail of operation, that all will have
been absorbed into a greater State and a more
controlling government. That is, a greater
political synthesis will have been attained, by
natural evolution, not by perilous revolution.

Such an international synthesis is hardly a
matter for objection or approval, any more than
is gravitation or the light of the sun. It repre-
sents the logical end of the world's political
evolution; and Socialism, Women's Suffrage,
Arbitration, exhibit only the more obvious
examples of those myriad ties already knitting
the broken bones of nationalism into one healthy
humanity.

Considering the world in its material aspect,
we see the supreme futility of individualism as

THE NEW SOCIAL SYNTHESIS 103

an end or even motive of action. It is merely
the jungle instinct asserting itself anew in our
wrongly-termed civilization. It is only the old
brute terror of pain and annihilation, impelling
the individual to skulk from tree to tree, fearing
every other individual, thus incurring hostility
from all. How unsafe that armed peace really
was ! But after a little, the savage learns to
ally himself with a little group of brothers, sons,
and cousins, born in his own particular cave, and
thus sharing a bit of that redeeming virtue which
makes Ms cave, Ms spear, and Ms woman so much
more superior and " distinctive " than those of
any other man ; he learns, that is, to create a
new political synthesis, in which the original law
of self-preservation gives way to the law that the
real safety of the individual derives from the
safety of the tribe, not because the second law
is more idealistic, but plainly because it is more
effective. But the new synthesis adopts precisely
the same law of self-preservation for the tribe
unit, and consequently that particular jungle
becomes merely a series of mutually-fearful and
destructive tribes instead of a series of mutually-
fearful, destructive individuals. In time, how-
ever, by a further transfusion of that mystic

104 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

essence of egoism which first made the indi-
vidual's own cave superior to his neighbour's,
then his own tribe superior to the tribe across
the river in time, the tribes in that neighbour-
hood dissolve into a greater synthesis, the clan ;
and by their mere dissolution render for ever
impossible the old interminable tribal feuds.
But the tribal feud merely gives way to the
clan war, which is an advance in civilization
simply because it renders fighting more un-
frequent, and removes it farther and farther
from the home, where the women are engaged
in their constructive occupations, and the clan
war, to all intents and purposes, constitutes that
particular misinterpretation of the law of self-
preservation by which we are all burdened with
taxes, armaments, and discouraging rumours to-
day. But we are witness to an increasing fellow-
ship between the nations, their increasing need
for an alliance against the common foe of ignor-
ance, sickness, poverty, and crime, and we know
that before long this common necessity will
overflow the jealous political confines of State
and merge all the States into a greater synthesis
a social organization more idealistic than the
present order only because it is more productive

THE NEW SOCIAL SYNTHESIS 105

and effective. And gazing down at the aimless,
hurrying crowds below, we realize that the new
synthesis will come as soon as it has been
sanctified in the old orthodox manner by a
symbol and an immediate personal advantage,
sufficiently permeated, that is, by the enduring
egoism of men.

By the vital necessity inherent in our social
development, therefore, we are driven forward
to an order in which every present isolated
political unit shall be co-ordinated with every
other ; an order, moreover, which can and shall
take advantage of powerful social principles by
securing a closer relationship between economics
and law. The individual is now only occasion-
ally the unit of social responsibility ; the far
greater part of our social existence depends upon
the responsibility of larger units, such as parties,
corporations, and unions. Our legislative prob-
lem, accordingly, consists in developing a legal
status for the institution to correspond with the
legal status of the individual under a simpler
social order. If the results were not so tragic,
it would be ridiculous to consider the futility
of modern law in the presence of powerful
institutions.

106 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

But such a social order would be a political
synthesis merely, a synthesis affecting only part
of our nature and daily life. There would still
remain unprovided for that immense and all-
important activity and life we call religion ; and
being unprovided for in the political synthesis,
it would not be merely neutral to our political
existence, but necessarily and continually hostile.
Unrelated social elements possess no neutrality,
and can never be endowed with the irresponsi-
bility which neutrality contains. They are either
for us or against us, and as long as they remain
unrelated to the general scheme they will prove
a terrible foe to our daily welfare.

Our religious history is merely the projection
of our political growth upon another plane the
continual re-interpretation, on terms ever more
inclusive and efficient, of the instinct of spiritual
self-preservation. The savage, and the uncivilized
individual in every environment, guards his soul
from the world as zealously as he guards his
body, and with as little success. Without
pausing to duplicate, with slightly differing
phrases, the process from lesser to greater syn-
thesis in religion similar to that we have just
observed in politics, we must admit that the

THE NEW SOCIAL SYNTHESIS 107

present religious situation is the contemporary
stage of a development beginning ages ago, and
still far from its termination.

Just as we have the mutually opposing and
stultifying States, so we have the mutually
opposing Churches and religions. Episcopal,
Congregational, Nonconformist, are merely cities
in the province of Protestantism ; Protestant,
Catholic, and Greek Church are only provinces
in the Christian state ; Christianity and Moham-
medanism are merely Europe and Asia written
in terms of religion. But many a person who
will admit the possibility of a larger political
synthesis, will either deny the possibility of a
complete synthesis in religion, or vigorously
discount its vital necessity. For why, as the
argument runs, why should we bother about
a man's inner belief so long as his actions
correspond with our ethic and our politic ? In
this one sphere, at least, every man has a right
to his own opinion ! Moreover, he might insist,
we have fought our bloodiest battles to secure
this very tolerance. Is it so poor an acquisition
that we must despise it as soon as gained ?
Though fanaticism is only a more intense expres-
sion of that partisan feeling which arms one

108 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

nation against all nations, our present so-called
religious tolerance is not the sympathetic recon-
ciliation of deep wisdom ; it is rather the laissez-
faire of complete indifference. Indifference,
however, constitutes the one unforgivable sin
in religion as in marriage. What form of toler-
ance, then, shares earnestness with wisdom ;
what tolerance is both creative and neutral ?

By the development of comparative religion
into a philosophy, if not a science, we have
learned to express every revelation in terms
of personal experience. The essence of Chris-
tianity, for example, is unselfish love, a doctrine
which has absolutely nothing to do with our
European ecclesiastical evolution, but derives
at first hand from Christ, an Oriental. Applied
as a test to our numerous forms of Protestantism,
it violently impeaches their long severance, while
it demands their immediate union. We have
only to stand within our own particular sect
and study its points of difference from other
sects in the light of pure Christianity. We
find that the difference is either historical,
theological, or social ; spiritual it certainly is
not, and by the same token it is unnecessary.
A synthesis of the Protestant sects, then, it

THE NEW SOCIAL SYNTHESIS 109

follows, is not only possible, but inevitable. It
may be difficult or even undesirable to merge
two social clubs whose membership draws from
different classes or interests ; it may be difficult
or even undesirable to unite two conflicting
philosophies into one reconciling system of
thought ; but I hope no one can be found who
will assert that Christianity in its enduring,
essential aspect as spiritual activity, shares the
limitations either of social clubs or intellectual
schemes. Without bringing any new or foreign
element into the discussion, but applying to each
sect the test of its own faith, we can dissolve
all Protestantism into a new, glorious synthesis,
can unite all these scuffling religious tribes into
one potent nation.

But Christianity itself would still remain
fatally divided. Proceeding by the same method,
however, and undeterred either by the glamour
of the organization or the apparent authority of
the priestly army arrayed before both camps, we
can impose the same stern spiritual test, derived
from Him whom both alike acknowledge as their
Origin and Head, and by the resulting success,
or failure, of its operation, can discover how
much, or how little real Christianity enters into

110 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

either Church. We perceive, on a larger scale,
the same source of discord which has prevented
the alliance of Protestant sects, that the essential
spiritual activity of men has been perverted,
repressed, debased, and obscured by social and
intellectual considerations. Those of either
camp who refuse to meet upon the common
spiritual basis, which is neither Protestantism nor
Catholicism, but the ideal of both, those we
know and know by the authority of Christ
Himself are like unto the rich young man who
would not leave his goods to follow the spiritual
impulse. They are mere partisans, materialists,
and slaves to the dehumanizing, despiritualizing
ecclesiastical machine.

But having established a firm basis common to
all so-called Christians a spiritual and religious
synthesis into which all creeds, sects, and schisms
can be dissolved, reconciled, and allied we find
that we have merely come to the frontier
between Christianity, Mohammedanism, Bud-
dhism, Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, and other
Oriental religions. Is this soul-strewn frontier
inevitable and permanent? Let us approach
the problem from our own religious point of
view, and work forward on lines already familiar

THE NEW SOCIAL SYNTHESIS 111

to our thought. Imagine a sincere, spiritual
man who felt an intense desire to bridge this
dismal gulf between the races, a man bred in the
Christian tradition, but fitted by his own intelli-
gence to perceive the difference between the
essential and the accidental, between the eternal
spirit and the local manifestation. Going to the
East, he would find a religious situation strik-
ingly like our own, a philosophic system and an
ecclesiastical organization grown up about some
Prophet Mohammed, Buddha, or another. He
would find also that, just as in the West, each
religion possessed two kinds of adherents those
who merely wore the orthodox badge, so to
speak, and those who gained true spiritual
activity through a loyal, vital faith. Engaging
in conversation with one of the latter (devoutly
wishing meanwhile that every race had learned
a secondary, universal language in addition to its
local mother-tongue), he would quickly make
two discoveries: first, that the Oriental and
himself had a strong ground for sympathy and
union in their mutual love for God and
humanity ; second, that they possessed a strong
ground for bitterness and contention in their
adherence to separate ecclesiastical organizations

112 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

and to unrelated theological traditions. In pro-
portion as they spoke of the religious life in
terms of personal experience faith, joy, vision,
love, prayer they would feel a mutual fellow-
ship and respect ; but in proportion as they spoke
of the religious life in terms of Churches, priests,
and propaganda, they would fall into mutual
hatred and contempt. But each would realize
that this very hatred and contempt destroyed his
own spiritual activity, and under penalty of
losing his joy and power, each must emphasize
the reasons for mutual sympathy and union, and
resolutely thrust away the reasons for discord.
In other words, the Occidental and the Oriental
must confine their intercourse entirely to man's
common love for God and man's common need
for a better social order. It would not take long
under these circumstances to convince the
average man that a union between the racial
religions is possible, but only by merging each
religion into a new, greater Religion a religion
of personal spirituality and social service, a
Religion of God and humanity. In his conversa-
tions with the Oriental, moreover, the Occidental
would incidentally make other discoveries, if
indeed he had not already learned the facts by

THE NEW SOCIAL SYNTHESIS 113

his studies in comparative religion. He would
discover that the prophet's relation to society is
that of teacher that the prophet creates a new
synthesis in the spiritual world just as the
statesman creates a new synthesis in the world
of politics. And just as every nation has its
founder, the hero whose vision and power made
possible the national existence, so has each religion
its founder, the hero whose vision and power
united the jealous tribes of superstition and
ignorance into racial consciousness.

But even when a people receives its political
consciousness from one source, and its religious
consciousness from another, the two become
inextricably fused and involved, so that the
political activity gains a kind of sanctity and
awe, while the religious activity waxes bold on a
hearty fare of racial egotism. Moreover, as in
looking back to our Romulus, our King Alfred,
our Washington, we feel more intensely the
limits of the synthesis they created, and feel
more bitterly the opposition of similar syntheses ;
so in proportion as we consider it proper and
obligatory to look back to Christ, to Buddha, to
Mohammed, we feel the terrible grip of our own
religious organization and the threatening fanati-

114 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

cism of all others. On the other hand, when we
turn our gaze forward when we face the same
way they did we feel these limits less and less,
this mutually- destructive hostility less and less,
and find ourselves in the sweep of a great
evolution carrying all nationalities onward into
one Confederation, all religious organizations
forward to one Religion. The truth even occurs
to us that our Christ, our Alfred, or Washington ,
would advise us to do that very thing.

The Western student in the East would learn
another fact even less appreciated by society :
that each hemisphere, in developing along totally
different lines, has acquired the one essential
aspect of truth which the other most needs at
the present crisis. The East contains a great
store of the spiritual wisdom which Europe and
America are starving for; while the West
possesses a practical knowledge, a social science,
without which Oriental civilization is helpless as
a child. In other words, Occident and Orient,
viewed at large, are the masculine and feminine
elements, so to speak, whose union makes human
nature harmonious, powerful and productive.
The hostility apparently fundamental between
them is therefore merely the friction that

THE NEW SOCIAL SYNTHESIS 115

naturally arises when a vigorous young barbarian
has stolen a beautiful, sensitive aristocrat for his
wife. His strength she admires, but its unre-
strained and crude impulsiveness offends her her
refined beauty, ever somewhat aloof, charms his
imagination, but with it he meets a physical
scrupulousness and a moral elasticity which seem
artificial and debasing. However, a greater
power than cither's personal opinion holds them
together. Little by little the man acquires
penetration and tact, little by little the woman
grows more sympathetic and practical ; and if at
their death both still feel a gulf between their
natures, they have survived long enough to see
the two natures united in their children. The
descendants, combining and establishing the
superiority of both parents, reveal a human
nature more capable that either stock alone.

But when the spiritual Occidental and the
spiritual Oriental have agreed upon the new
religious synthesis in which both can dissolve
their separate traditions into a common tradition,
looking about to see what obstacle actually
prevents such a synthesis becoming an imme-
diate fact, they perceive that the organization
itself, whether Eastern or Western, tends to

116 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

prevent the operation of the laws that are
striving to merge the races. For, strange as
it may sound at first, the only purpose of
Christianity is to make Christians that is, to
bring all men and women into the circle of one
Revelation, and by making the whole world (if
possible), look backward toward Christ, see the
divine love in Him, and consequently feel a
unity. But most unfortunately for the purpose,
Mohammedanism possesses an organization even
more vigorous and effective. And the whole
purpose of Mohammedanism is to make Moham-
medans to bring all men and women into the
circle of another Revelation, and by making the
whole world look backward toward Mohammed,
see the divine love in him, and consequently
come into a different unity. These rival organi-
zations constitute a dead centre which no human
effort can overcome. One might as reasonably
attempt to make all the English Germans, or all
the Germans English. It is in the new synthesis,
the religion which transcends each by including
all it is in the looking and going forward that
mankind will unite in one faith and adoration.
The prophets are moons that reflect the light of
God ; we must use the moon as a guide to

THE NEW SOCIAL SYNTHESIS 117

reveal the sun, not as itself the source of heat
and illumination.

It is very clear, at this stage of the argument,
that a vital relationship exists between spiritual
and political truth. It must be more than blind
chance which has paralleled the economic with
the religious necessity. For the virtue, Unity,
most essential to modern government is the
virtue most essential to modern religion. We
have arrived at a plane upon which social science
and Revelation say exactly the same thing ; and
we have arrived there by routes traversing both
politics and religion, finding the outlook start-
lingly similar in both cases. How is this ?

The answer lies in the essential unity of
personality. In himself, a man combines all the
factors of society Church and State merely
express different phases of the one integral life
of men. But since there exists this eternal
personal unity, it is very evident that the
separation of Church and State threatens the
welfare of every individual ; and indeed this is
so. We are all divorced. We carry on daily
activity, which our religious advisers criticize or
sadly condone. The true religious impulse,
which ought to thrust our lives forward easily

118 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

and happily through the day's work, has been
trained to resist that work ; and consequently
the spiritual necessity is opposed to the material
necessity, the moral code to the business code,
and we bring a sundered nature both to religion
and to our task.

But this divorce cannot long endure. The
unity that is within us demands a unity without.
A political synthesis is very well by itself, and a
religious synthesis is very well by itself; but
their unco-ordination on such a vast scale
would bring about such terrible results that the
situation would be unendurable. We need, then,
a new social synthesis, in which the world- States
and the world-Churches are united and allied ;
and happily for the race, the same development
working in nations and Churches to secure their
respective unity, is also working in both to secure
their common unity.

The alienation of religion from government,
then, is directly responsible for a world which,
collectively, is weak, inefficient and cowardly;
and, individually, contains men and women
absolutely prevented from realizing their best
selves joined, as the Creator intended, slowly
but surely will arise a civilized, civilizing

THE NEW SOCIAL SYNTHESIS 119

Humanity, and a powerful, serene manhood
and womanhood. For we have not yet realized
the most vital change that will occur in human
life. The union of spiritual activity with
practical intelligence involves and renders pos-
sible no, renders necessary a social organiza-
tion increasingly simple. For the first effect
of spiritual activity upon the individual is to
make his life simple and sweet. The orgy of
organized pleasure-hunting, which wastes more
than half our social energy as well as our natural
resources, nauseates him from the moment that
he discovers a keener, more enduring joy within
his own being. All that dehumanizing burden
of obligation and expenditure implied in the
word " establishment " he throws off with an
exhilarating and grateful sense of freedom. His
home takes on a new meaning, because it reveals
a new use ; and without growing austere and
ascetic on the contrary, finding a strange,
exciting enjoyment in material things he rear-
ranges his social life on an entirely new basis.
He does not surrender unnecessary luxury with
the desperation of a society woman doing Lenten
penance he throws it from him with the un-
conscious vigour of a traveller who awakes in a

120 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

wonderfully mild tropical climate, after having
lain down shivering under a padded quilt. This
necessity for lightness and freedom of personal
activity, this new obligation to respond to
spiritual pressure, penetrating like a milder
climate into every human relationship, will
naturally, inevitably render our present economic
and political vestment vastly too oppressive.
For the ultimate, intoxicating secret of human
life will then little by little disclose itself; that
the whole purpose of society is to develop and
maintain spiritual activity in all its members
not to develop institutions and maintain
property. This is the ultimatum of our own
natures we cannot disobey if we would, nor go
on doubting and denying. All that obstructs,
sterilizes, and delays our spiritual develop-
ment, must gradually disappear from the social
structure ; and our children's children will con-
sider the nineteenth century as the climax of some
dream whose very horror smote the sleeper to
consciousness and the dawning day.

Our generation, then, stands at the beginning
of a supreme expansive social phase. I have
employed the term " the new social synthesis "
to express that order toward which we move.

THE NEW SOCIAL SYNTHESIS 121

The phrase has been indirectly defined ; I wish
to make it as clear as possible, however, and will
accordingly summarize its aspect from the point
of view of the individual member of society and
the individual social institution, whether Church
or State.

There is in us that series of impulses toward
physical, mental, and moral activity which we
recognize as the religious life. Their activity
is so involved and interdependent that we cannot
separate and distinguish out the moral life as
being religious, while the physical and the intel-
lectual are non-religious. It is rather their
complex, as expressed in the various inward
necessities of the passing moment, which deserves
the name religious. But this series of impulses
comes into contact with the outer world at every
moment, or is itself affected by the outer world.
The individual, accordingly, makes one all-
important demand upon society that his own
positive, life-driven impulses be given oppor-
tunity of expression ; and that society do not
so affect him through the activity of others that
his impulses are stunted or perverted. The
society in which this demand is fulfilled can
only be constructed by the co-operation of

122 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

spiritual necessity, as driving and directing force,
with social science as agent and tool. In other
words, the individual must seize upon every
material factor and lever, and employ them for
the ultimate benefit of the inward life. Religion
must be expressed as efficient, wisely directed
service ; and, indeed, the history of every superior
man and woman illustrates a hitherto ineffectual
but earnest attempt td ameliorate the social
condition.

Of the separate institutions existing to-day,
one necessary virtue must be demanded : that
they benefit the inner life, and not destroy it by
insistence upon mere material things. The scope
of their vision must be extended. The State
which attempts to serve its citizens by resisting
the needs of other States, really and vitally
injures the well-being of its citizens, and does not
at all accomplish the purpose of its own existence.
Likewise the Church whose code is confined to
the salvation of its own members, damns those
members to the very negation of spiritual activity.
Last of all, institutions must cease splitting up
acts into " religious " and " secular," and dividing
man's necessity to be from man's necessity to do.
In Part VI. this subject will be treated more fully.

THE NEW SOCIAL SYNTHESIS 123

But it is not enough to describe a superior
social order ; it is not enough even to point out
the elements existing in the present order from
which the new order can be constructed. As I
have tried to emphasize, all social authority and
power derive from individual consciousness ; and
hampered as we all are, how can we exert
sufficient pressure to mould governments and
Churches to a new form ? The individual citizen
and the individual Church-member is weak ; it
would seem that we should have access to some
force as powerful as life itself to make the task
possible. If it could be brought about as the
harvests come by co-operation with Nature we
might dare believe. What seeds have we whose
harvest shall be the new social synthesis ? In
what field, and by what sun and rain will they
grow and be fruitful ? Let us look more closely
into the sources of social activity.

Not the busy efforts of public men, but evolu-
tion itself, throwing all things into a world- wide
interminable flux, its momentum derived quite
apart from human interference, bears the race for-
ward by its universal gravitation. Even when
men resist, they and their institutions, ineffectively
struggling, are swept along from the lesser to the

124 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

greater synthesis, from wasteful and repressive
division to unity increasingly productive and
liberating. The force of peoples lies not in their
troops and taxes, but in their alignment with
evolution. When evolution has passed the point
of competing, hostile nations, as it has now passed
it, our troops and taxes no longer represent nor
produce power, but weakness. We of to-day are
no longer defended by our navies ; we are con-
stantly threatened by them. All this machinery
of Church and State works against social evolu-
tion, and therefore expends our time and labour
for no return. The ship of State is trying to sail
upstream. But whether we know it or not, like
it or not, assist it or not, our institutions are
slipping with the stream toward a new synthesis.
We have only to discover the true direction of
social evolution, yield ourselves unreservedly to
its power, and we shall find ourselves quietly
arrived among better conditions of life. The
sublimest social ideal any man is capable of
imagining is merely the revelation, for the im-
mediate future, of the direction and force of this
transcendent power. The greatest man is he who
avails himself of its activity, deriving his politics
from the needs and conditions of a people, not

THE NEW SOCIAL SYNTHESIS 125

from his own insinuating egotism. And the
least of men is he who blindly attempts to resist
or pervert evolution, whether he be a private
citizen voting for vicious candidates, or an ex-
president opposing international arbitration for
the sake of an absolutely non-existing chimera
called national honour. Both, to the best of
their personal ability, are delaying the design of
the Creator both will fail, but in their attempt
will drag others down.

There is no better example of such blindness
and consequent failure than Napoleon. In him-
self he possessed a mind supremely directive, a
will supremely strong, a personality supremely
able to gather men to his devoted support. In
France he possessed a people whom centuries of
accumulating indignation had kindled to the
point of social fusion. But he knew not the
direction along which evolution was urging the
nation ; he threw himself blindly into the uni-
versal stream and thought to divert its course so
as to further his personal ambition. His great-
ness, consequently, dazzles and astounds only
when compared with common men. He merely
exaggerated our own selfishness to a colossal
stature. Compared with the opportunity France

126 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

offered him, he seems a mere puppet, a frantic
doll thrust out of the game into a corner, his tin
sword broken, and his bright uniform sadly torn.
His tragedy is the tragedy inevitable to the per-
sonality which uses men for self, not for society.
But we are not thereby compelled to accept the
traditional " good " man as our ideal. No well-
meaning Dr. Primrose, but the far-sighted,
constructive Harriman represents the type to
which our praise is due ; but the Harriman con-
scious of his true relationship to society, and by
that consciousness enabled to make his own
greatness a social agency beneficial, therefore
effectual, beyond the maddest dream of the
ambition exiled upon the prison isle of self.

Evolutionary also, as we now realize, is that
other stream of force which rolls through every
individual, bearing the conscious soul to ever
broader and deeper states of being. Evolutionary,
it is impersonal, transcendent, irresistible. All
the ignorance and malice of which a human soul
is capable at its worst hour can, by continual
exertion, merely hold back the individual from
the universal progression to which humanity was
dedicated by the fiat of creation. It can merely
hold back, as a savage can hold his canoe steadfast

THE NEW SOCIAL SYNTHESIS 127

in a swift river it cannot change the course of
the current nor withdraw itself from the river's
pressure. All men, at all times, live their lives
in the full rush of elemental and eternal powers.
All the unhappiness and ruin implied in sin, that
word of oldest awe, result from the effort to
resist, evade, or divert spiritual evolution ; all
happiness, all power, all harmony, all peace,
derive automatically from the mere act of yield-
ing to the inner stream.

In evolution, therefore, we possess the force
of nature whose co-operation offers us what
harvest we will. Our individual characters and
desires are the seed ; and as the seeds fall so the
harvest must appear. Undeveloped characters
and selfish desires were sown for the social order
we now reap ; but character and desire are under-
going a tremendous educational process in our
generation. The immediate task before all men
and women is to understand for themselves, and
teach to others, the nature of personal and social
evolution, and how they are essentially reciprocal.
For co-operation with evolution is brought about
by conscious individual adaptation to spiritual
and social law. The law operates beneficially only
upon conscious minds. Each man and woman

128 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

comes under the control of spirit when he accepts
the law ; and society will come under the control
of evolution when the law is accepted by all
in common. How, then, to propagate the
teaching ? The most effective social momentum
the supreme thrust by which individuals are
flung forward into a superior social order is that
derived from the union of statesman and prophet
in one man. From no other source can the
world acquire the enthusiastic faith out of which
unselfish acts are done, and the social vision
caught and renewed. For the teaching, in other
words, we must have a divine Teacher.

PART IV

THE DIVINE TEACHER

IV

A GALILEAN shepherd or fisherman, whom good
fortune or the sure intuition of divine curiosity
had permitted to hear the Sermon on the
Mount, on returning to his neighbours filled
with intense joy and conviction, might con-
ceivably have told them of this teaching without
mentioning the Christ who uttered it ; but how-
ever thoroughly he understood the new gospel,
however clearly he repeated it in his native
village, the completeness and power of his story
would have been fatally broken without an
expressed personal attitude toward the Prophet,
and a lifelong, lifedeep consciousness of the divine-
human presence. For the Prophet's relation to
his teaching utterly transcends its mere formula-
tion into written or spoken words. He is not
merely the creator of a new body of spiritual
truth, in the manner that a poet creates a new
interpretation of life in terms of a dramatic or

131

132 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

epical reaction. Homer attains personality
through the Iliad ; Shakespeare's presence de-
fines itself in the presence of his characters ; but
a revelation exists only to the extent that its
Prophet continues to exist in the consciousness
of men, and apart from his existence in human
consciousness it has no being. For a revelation
is essentially personality, human life, character,
destiny. Printed, it remains only a philosophy
or dream until, somehow, by an overwhelming,
passionate desire for spiritual excellence, the
Prophet Himself is felt as a living, immediate
presence and being, when the words leap out as
from moving lips, and become ever afterward
his words, wherever, however met. No man,
it can be stated, ever actually found Christ in
his message, but always his message in the
Christ.

The secret of this lies in the fact that the
spiritual life, as we understand and desire it, is
Christ. The two have become identified, and in
the person of the man Jesus the spiritual life has
its eternal type and reality. The spiritual life,
we must realize, is the expression of an inner
activity which renders the individual a perfect
harmony. All morality, all virtue, all spiritual

THE DIVINE TEACHER 133

conduct derive from the individual, as leaves
derive from the activity of a tree. Without the
inner balance and unity, there can be no morality,
virtue, nor spiritual conduct, or, as the personality
is partly and incompletely spiritual, life expresses
itself in spasmodic and fragmentary morality and
action. Christ the Prophet, and Christ the
inner balance, are a perfect whole a man. The
rest of the world are only parts of a perfect whole
and fractions of men. But this perfection of
manhood, the conscious or unconscious passion
of every life, can never be realized apart from its
perfect type. Thus, in proportion as men have
from time to time recovered his presence as an
actual, palpable existence in their conscious souls,
they have recovered for themselves the manhood
he expressed to the world. At other times,
when the presence is lost, the type of perfect man-
hood disappears, and men become unable to rise
above their weak and sundered natures. They
become desperately virtuous without sympathy,
moral without joy, or theological without vision
subject always to disastrous readjustments,
plunging them into frank bestiality or critical
atheism. The Prophet, then, has this supremely
important relationship to the world : he is the

134 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

eternal point of recovery for the vision of self,
and in the Prophet's station all men exist
potentially perfect. No other man can effect
this recovery perfection is unique for the
civilization it represents and for us, accordingly,
the ideal of human nature has been for ever set
apart and sanctified in the person of the Jew,
Jesus Christ.

For all that the Prophet was human nature
made perfect, and for all that men in every age,
of all classes and kinds, have recovered their own
innate perfection in him, yet Christianity, as a
civilization, is completely, conspicuously a failure.
It has worked out for individuals, but not for
society. Why should that be ? Why should it
be that the Church, in the vigour of its youth,
could not retain its unity, but split into Roman
and Greek ? Why is it that this Holy Catholic
Church is neither holy nor catholic ? Why is it
that under the very shadow of the Cross, the
national instinct of Europe developed into an
overwhelming racial egotism and State selfish-
ness ? While Europeans all professed themselves
Christians, why did they divide themselves into
Germans, Italians, French ? Why is the national
government to-day, even in Catholic countries,

THE DIVINE TEACHER 135

far stronger and more popular than the ecclesias-
tical organization? The facile reply to this
indictment, throwing the fault upon human
nature itself, or even upon " external irresistible
forces," involves the deduction that either the
Christian ideal is essentially impracticable and
obsolete, or that religion itself really has no con-
cern with daily life. But Christianity has always
worked out for individuals, and is still working
out for individuals with undiminished success.
It* failure evidently consists in its lack of a social
control.

Christianity, indeed, as all men dimly recog-
nize, is religion in terms of the individual, not in
terms of society. To understand the distinction
fully, we must go back to Christ's ministry and
study its method. He met people singly, in
groups, or in assembled multitudes. But the
groups and the multitudes were only the in-
dividual man and woman multiplied. That is,
the multitude who heard the Sermon on the
Mount came and heard it in their simple capacity
of human beings. Like any casual multitude
which our civilization contributes to a public
speech or exhibition, they threw aside for the
time their accidental class distinctions, their

136 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

political opinions and connections, their trades
and professions, and entered heartily into the
spirit of the occasion. The same man-to-man
unity and simplicity takes place to-day, under
one condition, at every public meeting, whether
it be the church, the theatre, or the athletic field,
and that condition is that the occasion offer
interest enough to divest the individual of his
accidental social attributes. Christ's conversa-
tions and addresses offered this interest in the
most abundant measure. His personality pos-
sessed, and still possesses, the unique property of
desocializing the individual and making him, for
the time being, an elemental and eternal soul.
He addressed himself to that elemental and
eternal soul-thing inherent in every man and
woman, summoning it from its inactive im-
maturity or controlling it in its often violent and
misdirected maturity always and for ever devot-
ing himself to the task of intensifying the
spiritual activity of men. He found human
nature a misunderstood, uncorrelated form of
existence, and he gave our civilization the type
of personality at its best. But it is only for the
time that the individual man and woman can be
desocialized. \Yhen the sermon is spoken, the

THE DIVINE TEACHER 137

drama played, the multitude separates, each man
his own way to his own duty. Little by little
the charm is broken ; slowly but surely the
fisherman find himself a fisherman once more,
the banker becomes the banker, the democrat the
democrat, the philosopher the philosopher, and
the fool the fool. Within less than a day the
common social necessity has seized inexorably
upon each man and woman, and all fall back
into their former races, classes, occupations, and
temperaments.

Yet all alike may carry away the Christ-given
vision of his own perfection with the desire to
attain that perfection in terms of daily life. But
what happens ? What did happen, historically ?
The individual found that the new gospel taught
him precisely his proper attitude toward every
other individual, but it said absolutely nothing as
to his proper attitude toward other men and
women as society. The Christian thus found,
and finds to-day, that his religion succeeds
wherever he deals with individuals, but fails
wherever he deals with numbers. He is equipped
to treat properly his father, his mother, his
brother and sister, his wife, his children, his
servants, and his neighbours in other words, he

138 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

is equipped for life in the simplest of all societies;
but in any society even by a little more extended
and complex, he must depend upon the ex-
perience of men. That is, he goes to religion to
solve his personal relations, but he goes to science
to solve his social relations. When it comes to a
matter of law-making, the beatitudes are less
useful than a child's primer of economics ; and
the Golden Rule is mute in the presence of the
vote. We have in Christianity, then, a man-to-
God and a man-to-man revelation, but not a
man-to-men revelation, by reason of Christ's
method of ministry. For our modern life, there-
fore, Christianity is not only incidentally or
accidentally a failure ; it is inherently, absolutely,
and permanently a failure. It does not fail to
work in the same way that a child's tin sword
would fail to work in a desperate battle it fails
to work as the microscope fails to work when
directed against the stars. The focus lies in the
individual consciousness, while the whole world
travaileth for a religion whose focus is projected
into the consciousness of society.

If any doubt of these conclusions exists, we
have only to consider the case of Tolstoy. Tolstoy
was so great a man that by his individual spiritual

THE DIVINE TEACHER 139

efforts he recovered the soul of a departed age.
The " Bible times," with their tremendous back-
ground and atmosphere palpitant with divine
things, seemed to return as the environment of
his life, and through one personality to be
imposed upon our modern civilization. The
Hebrew tradition, created in the Eden of some
ancient popular joy, thrust into unhappiness for
disobedience to the spiritual impulse ; populating
the earth ; accumulating the dynamic experience
of Cain, Noah, Abraham, Job ; enriched by the
visions of Ezekiel and Isaiah ; socialized and
civilized by the Mosaic law ; consummated in the
revelations of Christ and Mohammed ; vitalized
thereby with eternal authority and power, but
diverted into the consciousness of two hostile
races ; for us continuing through the Apostles,
the evangelists, and martyrs, to the doctors and
mystics of the Roman Church ; broken again
into two hostile currents by the Reformation ;
now feebly and ineffectually diffused through
our social consciousness by the rills of a thousand
sects that tradition, the world's most imposing
synthesis of socialized spiritual experience, flashed
like an archangel's sword in this man's hand, and
clave in two the rotten shield of civilization.

140 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

He tried the world by the eternal test of
personal experience, and found beneath its
heavy vestments a heart dried by grief or fouled
by joyless passion. He held Europe before the
divine, searching mirror of the soul, and Europe
leered back a harlot and a knave. Tolstoy is
apostolic. Our dialects have no word for him
we must make use of the speech of peoples
who walked with God. King David, who
was also Warrior-David and Poet-David, could
understand this Russian better than the Russians ;
Job and St. Peter are nearer akin to his nature
than his own children. But what was the effect
upon society of this greatest of Christians ?
What did the Christian ideal accomplish through
this best of modern believers ? Tolstoy's influence
is a ferment whose activity has only just begun.
Nevertheless, judging his life by its results upon
social abuse upon the really fundamental,
inherent injustice of society it is fair to say
that the governor of Tolstoy's province, or the
mayor of any western city, could accomplish
more public benefit in six months than Tolstoy
brought about in a lifetime. Moreover, the
governor or mayor could do so without possess-
ing more than a fraction of Tolstoy's personal

THE DIVINE TEACHER 141

spirituality, and without paying the penalty of
his mental pain. Why ? Because the public
official has under his hands a few levers which
control the operation of the social machine
because he can affect a multitude of people of
both sexes, all ages, classes, religions, intellects,
and temperaments, without coming into direct
contact with a single one, or being diverted
from his purposes by maddening personal
questions ; while Tolstoy, working apart from
the social organization, had to influence people
one by one, through his example, his conversa-
tion, his literature, and his daily acts. That is,
he dealt with the world as if it were merely an
extensive but homogeneous group, like a High-
land clan or an African village. He used the
microscope of personal salvation instead of the
telescope of social salvation. His life, therefore,
was shut off from all other lives by an invisible
but impassable line ; he was a lone patriarch, an
austere apostle moving among his fellow men,
loving all, consecrated to the service of all, yet
unable to do more than clothe a few naked, visit
a few sick, and comfort a few broken-hearted.

Yet this merely implies inadaptability of the
Christian revelation to modern conditions ; it

142 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

does not expose any weakness in Christianity
when working in its own sphere. The micro-
scope is not to be broken because it will not
reveal the stars. No. Christianity remains a
perfect revelation for the personal life. It is
not an old, romantic dream, a hopeless effort to
spiritualize men, an almost abandoned faith in
God and heaven. Nor is religion merely a
function of primitive races and homogeneous
peoples, a refuge from the world and a cloistered
immunity from war, taxes, and children ; but if
really divine, it is evolutional, and will show
itself more administrative than government, more
authoritative than economics. Can it be so ?

It is very evident that we need a religion in
terms of society a revelation, that is, which will
not attempt to displace and deny the essential
truth of Christianity, but fulfil it for the modern
world. We need, in other words, the additional
lens which transforms the microscope into an
instrument for long distances. This religion
must not be a new religion, in the sense of being
an exotic, but a renewal of the existing religions
and their translation into a modern code and
gospel. Broadly speaking, it must be an identifi-
cation of social science with individual initiative

THE DIVINE TEACHER 143

and spiritual passion. The religious personality
must express itself socially, in public service,
allying itself with every available instrument for
reform. The old passion for self-salvation must
be recovered, invigorated, and intensified by
every possible means, but diverted, once for all,
into the channel of human service. Self-salvation
as a traditional psychology must be absolutely
stamped from the human consciousness ; as an
end for religious organizations it must be fought
as the true enemy of welfare, the only successful
opponent of the very self-spiritualization it is
supposed to bring about. The whole wretched
tradition of " self " and " heaven " must be re-
interpreted and re-expressed. From the servant-
maid who betrays her instincts to a priest lurking
in his dark confessional, to the Hamlet who
laments his weakness to the stars, the modern
world is infected by a diabolical perversion of
Christ's teaching. Instead of turning inward to
that fatal misadjustment by which most men and
women at some period of their lives are rendered
miserable and erring, instead of magnifying our
evil by concentrating upon its power to affect our
lives, we must resolutely turn all hope and
interest outward, fixing our thoughts on any

144 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

external a friend, a great social movement, or
God endeavouring by prayer and activity to
put ourselves into the stream of faith and en-
thusiasm constantly flowing across the world.
For the joyous and "free" man that is, the
man who has found salvation is he whose con-
sciousness has burst the bonds of self and become
identified with an outside thing. For him "self"
no longer exists ; and by entering his new state
of self-forgetfulness he transfers his spiritual
habitation, as it were, from a low, mean, smoke -
oppressed city to the vision-lapped mountain of
God.

But I need no more than suggest the new
theology, which has already received the attention
of modern minds. We are concerned here rather
with the origins of the religious movement which
alone can bring about the consummation we have
learned so devoutly to desire. It exists as the
best aspiration of earnest men, and as an aspira-
tion it has long existed. So also the aspiration
for a divine manhood and womanhood existed in
the racial consciousness long before the birth of
Christ. We yearn for a divine social order as
the Hebrews yearned for a divine personality;
but our passion is not at all a sign that we have

THE DIVINE TEACHER 145

transferred our faith from the soul to the machine.
It indicates, rather, as every man's experience
too clearly shows, that personality depends vitally
upon the social environment, and therefore that
in order to obtain men we must first obtain
means. An English clergyman voiced the com-
mon opinion when he said that it is unfair to
expect a man to meditate on heaven while he
owes the butcher ; but we must not overlook the
fact that our civilization renders it equally unfair
to the butcher. All the prophets since Christ
and there have been many have pointed the
popular consciousness toward social salvation ; and
the popular instinct, sometimes daring to believe
in the second coming of Christ, believes that His
modern message will contain hope for this world
as well as the next.

At all events, we are certain that religion can-
not be re-established except through the medium
of a Prophet, a " Messiah." As all the elements
that enter into a perfect personality had to be
united in one being and expressed in one life in
order to set before every man and woman the
type of his or her perfection, so must the elements
of the perfect social order be gathered and
synthesized in one mind in order to set before

10

146 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

each social concomitant the type of its own per-
fection. Before we can accomplish anything with
village, city, province, and nation, we must know
what the ideal village, city, province, and nation
are which in each case involves a knowledge of
what a perfect humanity would be or, better
still (since every social organization is in a con-
tinual state of flux, and perfection in each must
consist of a sliding scale of efficiency, a balance
undisturbed by mere change in number of
population or size of community) better still,
we must know what each person's attitude and
course of action must be in order to release the
evolutional tendencies toward efficiency in the
social order. For since society is an increasingly
complex system of men, women, and children,
its structure automatically undergoes constant
readjustment to the changing attitude and activ-
ity of its members. The Prophet of society,
accordingly, must first possess the divine person-
ality of the Christ, and then express this
personality in terms of social unity. That is, he
must take to himself the relation of all men and
women to their environments, throughout the
whole extent of that relation, from its immediate
contact with the town organization to its remote,

THE DIVINE TEACHER 147

yet equally important contact with State, with
other States, and with other races ; and uniting
all these complex, mutually opposing, and
stultifying relations into one harmonious syn-
thesis by the creative vision of his own soul, give
them all out again to the world as an ideal social
relationship in which every man, woman, and
child can find his own proper attitude and activity
clearly, eternally expressed. And this ideal type
must be able to serve for every nation alike, every
race alike, and every religion alike. It must be
more English than Magna Charta, more Ameri-
can than the Constitution, more Catholic than
Catholicism. It must be a universal synthesis,
that is, to insure the right evolutional adjustment
in the individual relationship derived therefrom.
By universal is not meant uniform, but that syn-
thetic comprehensiveness which permits to every
personality the sanctity of its differentiation, and
to every race the sanctity of its peculiar temper-
ament.

The Prophet, then, must be the world's
saviour ; not the representative of any nation,
race, or class. He must possess the unimpeach-
able authority of the divine personality and the
universal soul. He must actually be that human

148 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

unity of which all other men and women are the
essential parts. By that power of absolute self-
effacement which only the Divine Personality
acquires, he must send out his soul to all
places and peoples, infusing his divinity like an
essence throughout the world, gathering as upon
one sensitive plate the experience of every man
and woman ; then within his intelligence refin-
ing from all the ideal, typical experience in
which we may discover our own lives poten-
tially perfect. No less a result will serve ; for
we have already seen how national, racial,
and ecclesiastical egotism, far from insuring
superiority or even safety to the nation, the race
or the religion, necessarily surrounds it with
implacable foes and an inevitable fate. The
existence of any social fragment, in other words,
depends upon the unity and co-operation of the
whole society. The method by which this
Prophet would express his message, accord-
ingly, would differ from the method of Christ.
Reacting from society as a perfect organization
instead of from the individual man or woman
as a perfect personality, he would direct his
teaching so as to concern our social rather
than our personal relations. Re-establishing

THE DIVINE TEACHER 149

the authority of all existing authentic revela-
tions, he would not be confined to their mere
repetition nor even to their comparison and

reconciliation. The modern prophet, therefore,

i

on taking up the task differentiating him
from all previous prophets the task of extend-
ing Christianity, Mohammedanism, Buddhism,
Hinduism, to their evolutionally logical consum-
mation could not secure his purpose by the
spoken word and the sermon alone. The spoken
word is limited by the capacity of the hearers
and the opportunity of the occasion; but the
written word suffers no limitation, since it is
available to all men at all times. The Newest
Testament, that is, would be written by the
Prophet Himself.

Without such a Prophet, we know only
too thoroughly the helplessness of the world.
Liberalizing influences are everywhere at work,
but at most these can only raise existing institu-
tions to a higher efficiency, each within its own
compass ; they cannot transform the purpose for
which each institution was originally founded,
aligning it with the modern vision, nor can they
co-ordinate them. Only the synthesis of all
influences into one definite movement can free

150 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

men and women from this tangle of things.
Yet, as we have seen, the Prophet would bring
no message essentially new, in the sense that it
was unheard of. His message would consist of
all the aspirations of East as well as West, of
women as well as men. Its newness, therefore,
would appear in its supreme capacity to assimu-
late spiritual passion and social science into one
human synthesis. No man could receive such
a message and say that he himself had already
thought and desired its whole content ; yet all
men could hear it and say that it realized their
highest personal and social ideal. In him the
true Christian would be compelled to recognize
the Christ personality, and in him the atheistic
humanitarian must acknowledge a social zeal
and wisdom deeper than his own. Resistance to
him, and hatred of his followers, could derive
only from obvious and despicable motives ; pre-
judice, ignorance, selfishness, snobbery, bigotry.
Discounting the temporary opposition of privi-
leged or official cjasses who feared for their own
private prosperity, we can admit one fertile course
of obstruction in the very general characteristic
of men, which after centuries of social de-
velopment, after we have all learned not too

THE DIVINE TEACHER 151

grudgingly to share our food, our education, and
our vote, still makes us painfully loath to share
our God.

But this raises the question of the relationship
between such a prophet and Christ, Mohammed,
Buddha, and Zoroaster. The orthodox of all
races believe that God and his Prophet are a
natural and inalterable duality ; and that the
existence of any other prophet is a challenge to
the constancy of the Creator. Very happily, it
does challenge our conception of His constancy
as especial consideration for any particular race.
Each people has had its prophet ; but the
message of all has been essentially the same the
possibility of a perfect personality for every man
and woman. The new prophet would fulfil all the
prophets accordingly, by his interpretation of per-
sonality in terms of social service. Once admit-
ting the existence of an authentic revelation to
every race, we realize that each people has pro-
duced not one prophet only, but a succession of
prophets, the later revealing ever more and loftier
truth ; and that this fact depends upon a race's
increasing capacity to absorb teaching. The re-
lationship of a modern prophet, such as we have
imagined, to Christ or to Mohammed, may well

152 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

be expressed in the poetic figure of the East, as
the full moon rising on the fourteenth night,
which, while the same planet as the new moon,
can reflect more light than the new moon by
virtue of its more advantageous position.

If such a prophet should appear, his effect
upon the ordinary man and woman would be
immediate and immense. As religious natures
who felt sorrow at their inability to become
more than amateur, occasional, self-conscious,
and inefficient social workers, he would give
them an activity which increased their spirituality
at the same time that it accomplished results in
human lives ; as practical natures devoted to
some social or political reform without benefiting
by spiritual powers in themselves or in others,
he would set them an ideal which increased
their public efficiency at the same time that it
initiated their spiritual evolution ; and as for the
majority, who are neither very spiritual nor very
public-minded, he would rouse their lives from
negative adjustment to environmental pressure
as by the bugle of defensive war. For his
supreme influence would consist in restoring the
individual conscience to its proper relationship
toward self and others. To those confined in

THE DIVINE TEACHER 153

the dark prison of sickness or indifference, he
would fling the keys of joyful, invigorating
freedom ; and the over- conscientious he would
release from their atlas-burden of the world's
wrong. For, after all, the individual is limited
as to his social usefulness, and consequently as
to his responsibility. Whatever he can accom-
plish must be done outside the regular course of
business, yet inside the compass of the twenty-
four hours. Yet the new revelation would
provide him with an attitude which auto-
matically, by the momentum of social evolution,
must turn all his activity into public service,
thus preserving his self-respect without hardening
his sensibility, and releasing his natural impulses
toward joy without insulting the unfortunate
and weak. The ordinary person is not only a
temperament, which is a limitation in itself, but
also a member of one class, one nation, one
religion, and one race. These limitations are
inherent and eternal, but the new teaching
would turn the limitation of temperament into
the opportunity of personality, and would provide
every social position with a straight path toward
human unity and co-operation. As every being
can learn his own perfection in the station of

154 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

Christ, so could the world learn its unity in the
station of the new prophet ; which once given
mankind could never be lost, but would serve
every environment and every age as the point
of recovery for its perfect relationship to the
whole human society.

But now, after dealing with truth in the ideal
or spiritual world, I shall deal with truth in the
material or historical world. There are these
two orders of truth, both eternal and both
incontrovertible ; as when we say that the pure
in heart shall see God, arid that Columbus
discovered America. United, these two orders
of truth are not only incontrovertible, but
irresistible ; and it is in the deepest consciousness
of the import of both words that I tell the life
and teaching of him whose presence has realized
for men this new Prophet Baha'o'llah.

PART V

HISTORY OF THE BAHAI MOVEMENT

ON beginning a brief history of Baha'o'llah, 1
suggest that those startling parallels be noted
which exist between this prophetic manifestation
and the manifestation of Christ, to secure that
reverence without which places, people, and even
events, possess little of their true human value.
The differences, also, should be remarked no less
thoughtfully, for there are none without vital and
logical significance. It requires all our power of
concentration, comparison, and interpretation to
enter even partially into this divine life and works.
As one reads, moreover, passing from one city to
another, from one date to another, one should
raise a clear background of daily life and common
things, to throw into proper relief the Prophet's
tremendous figure.

In the year 1819, at Shiraz, Persia, was born
Mirza Ali Mohammed, the son of a prosperous
wool merchant. Upon his father's death, the

157

158 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

child was reared by an uncle, and given the
education of all Persian boys of his class. At the
age of twenty-four years, after a youth con-
spicuous for its reverence and beautiful character,
he announced to the principal scholars and holy
men of Persia that he bore a message from God,
which it was his destiny to give his country.
The Persia of that time was an autocratic govern-
ment, from which a great class of public officials
derived social position and wealth, while inex-
tricably involved in this political labyrinth ran
the orthodox Mohammedan faith. The priests,
or " mullahs," constituted a class as powerful and
severe as the aristocracy, and the interests of
both united in supporting religious orthodoxy and
political inflexibility. At the occasion of his
public announcement, Mirza Ali Mohammed
adopted the name of " Bab," which signifies door
or gate, and by this title has been called ever
since. His message, which he began to propagate
immediately, was clear and simple : that the
Mohammedan religion had been corrupted and
abused by ignorant, often vicious clergy, and
must be restored to its original purity ; that the
Koran was not the final revelation to Moham-
medans, but preparatory to another and greater

HISTORY OF THE BAHAI MOVEMENT 159

revelation ; and that after nineteen years would
appear the Great One, u He whom God would
make manifest." The Bab taught also the
spiritual equality of women with men.

His influence was powerful and immediate,
creating among the people a spirit of dissatis-
faction with existing conditions, fomented by a
new and passionate hope for better. The mullahs,
alarmed at a movement which impeached their
infallibility and threatened their supremacy and
emoluments, intrigued with the official class to
secure the Bab's imprisonment on the charge
of hostility to the State religion. After a mock
trial, this modern John the Baptist was shot
in a public square at Tabriz, in July, 1850. He
left eighteen disciples, one of whom, a woman
called Kurru-t'ul'Ayn (" Consolation of the
Eyes "), a poet, leader, and teacher, ranks among
the most powerful personalities of our time. She
also was executed for the faith two years later.
In 1852, a young Babi, his mind affected by the
execution of his master, made an unsupported and
unauthorized attempt upon the Shah's life. The
mullahs, who hitherto had been able to prove no
political connection in the Babi movement, now
gave it an indelible political complexion, and the

160 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

government transferred to its legal machinery the
trouble of exterminating the new sect. Leading
Babis were imprisoned and many prominent men
executed. Amid the frenzied persecution now
following, more than 30,000 men, women, and
children suffered martyrdom. In the worst
persecutions inflicted upon the early Christians
we find a parallel, but not a more terrible situation.
The suddenly awakened inhumanity of the
orthodox clergy and the official aristocracy, how-
ever, only emphasizes the stern joy with which
the Babis met doom. Execution was inflicted in
the most barbarous manner, and under the most
heartrending circumstances. It is unnecessary
to give details here the important fact for us is
that religious faith, in our own times, once more
revealed its secret power to triumph over the
agony of fire and steel, and so to elevate the soul
that parents could find joy in seeing their children
slain for the truth of God.

Among the most influential Babis was Mirza
Husain Ali Nuri, born at Nur, in Mazandaran,
on November 12, 1817. His family was
eminently noble, and had contributed viziers and
councillors to the royal court. In the natural
course of events, therefore, this child would have

HISTORY OF THE BAHAI MOVEMENT 161

become a courtier and official, but from his early
youth he turned toward his own spiritual de-
velopment, and refused to enter upon a public
career. He was imprisoned for four months
during these persecutions, confined in a dungeon,
heavily chained to five other Babis. When no
political conspiracy could be proved in his con-
duct or implied in his religious convictions, his
property was confiscated and he himself, with
his family, banished to Baghdad, beyond the
Persian border and under the jurisdiction of the
Sultan of Turkey. A great number of Babis,
feeling in him the intelligence, sympathy, and
courage necessary to guide them through such
trying times, followed with their families in
voluntary banishment. This took place in 1852.
The condition of the Babi community on its
arrival at Baghdad represented economic chaos,
complicated by the various opinions, social
positions, and temperaments of the individual
members. Mirza Ali, however, arranged their
lives and activities, constructing from these help-
less but willing emigrants an efficient, happy
settlement. As soon as the foundations had been
laid for their order and prosperity, he withdrew
to the mountains north of Sulaimanziah, where

n

162 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

for two years he lived in solitude, continually
meditating and drawing freely from the source of
all human inspiration and power. His presence
even there became known, and holy men from
near and far visited the hermit to discuss spiritual
problems and experience. After two years, the
Babi community at Baghdad urgently begged his
return, as their circumstances had become difficult
during his absence. Returning to Baghdad,
Mirza Ali gradually created so prosperous a
settlement that Babis and others from all parts of
Asia began to join themselves to the community.
Their increasing numbers and influence frightened
the clergy, and the Persian Government treated
with the Sultan for the surrender of the religious
leader. Preferring to retain him on Turkish
territory, the Sultan summoned Mirza Ali to
Constantinople. Outside Baghdad, on his way
to Constantinople, he stopped his first day's
journey at an estate called the " Garden of Riz-
wan," where he was joined by his followers,
nearly all having preferred to attend him in his
new exile. Twelve days were spent in the
Garden of Rizwan, during which time Mirza Ali
Nuri, by the authority of his own personality,
gave an eternal, world-wide significance to this

HISTORY OF THE BAHAI MOVEMENT 163

religious movement, and transferred its scope
from Persia and Mohammedanism to humanity
and religion. In this garden he announced to his
followers that he was the supreme manifestation
of God foretold by the Bab, and publicly assumed
the name of " Baha'o'llah," the Glory of God.
He commanded the Babis to look no more to
the Bab for their prophet, but to himself, whose
revelation would fulfil the Bab's prophecy and
dissolve their Mohammedan sect in the larger
synthesis of Bahaism. His announcement in-
cluded the declaration of the essential unity of
men, the common bond between the religions,
and the final reconcilement of Churches and
States in him. With the consciousness of their
new human significance, the Bahai exiles pro-
ceeded on their journey, and arrived at Constan-
tinople in 1864.

Their reception by the population was un-
expectedly friendly. The government placed
houses at the disposal of Baha'o'llah and his
family, while the followers found occupations in
the various bazaars. Converts to the cause were
made so rapidly that once more the orthodox
ecclesiastical organization set itself in motion
against Baha'o'llah, with the result that after

164 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

only four months in the capital, he was trans-
ferred to Adrianople, on the northern frontiers
of the Empire. Constantinople, we remember,
most conspicuously emphasizes the failure of
Christianity to control the political necessity
of men. The effect of residence at Adrianople
was to bring BahaVllah into relationship with
European civilization, thus uniting his intuitive
wisdom with that stock of scientific and socio-
logical experience which so completely differ-
entiates the personal problem of life in West
and East. Without this contact and assimila-
tion, Baha'o'llah's revelation might have re-
mained Oriental in its statement and expression,
and, conditioned by the incomplete social ex-
perience which that implies, might have reached
our Western consciousness only through the
medium of an intervening personality a
St. Paul, that is, whose interpretation would
have lessened fatally the prophet's power to
unite. Happily for both hemispheres alike, this
contact of intuition and social experience did
take place, and, as a result, Europe and America
enter equally with the Orient into this prophetic
station. The most conspicuous public action
of Baha'o'llah at Adrianople was to send letters

HISTORY OF THE BAHAI MOVEMENT 165

to the authorities of every Western nation, calling
for their co-operation in his purpose to unite
mankind. No one requires to be told how
negative an effect these letters apparently had
upon our history. In such a case, however,
we are not to judge the prophet's seeming
impotence from the official silence his letters
received ; we are to judge his authority and
irresistible power by the increasing development,
among the people themselves, of the same passion
for unity and reform. For a prophet is not
a commander, having armies and treasuries to
carry out his orders ; he is the expression of
those very inward impulses which all men will
learn in themselves to reverence and obey. In
these letters, moreover, Baha'o'llah uttered pre-
dictions which make them notable even on the
material plane. In 1868, for example, he fore-
told to Napoleon III. the fall of his empire, and
to the Pope the loss of his temporal power.* A
cross section of European and American history
in that year would render the letters their true
and awful significance as the utterance of the
world's own conscience, awakening to its de-

* BahaVllah also foretold the loss of Adrianople to the
Turks. His imprisonment in that city is most interesting
to recall at the present time.

166 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

humanizing social conditions. A petty sectarian
agitation, semi - religious and semi - political,
aroused by a rival among the Babis, again
brought the Bahai movement before the political
authorities, and in 1868 Baha'o'llah's enforced
pilgrimage began once more, taking him this
time, with about seventy followers, to the lowest
and meanest of Turkish penal settlements, the
prison of Akka in Palestine.

The instructions concerning their treatment
sent to the prison officials were most severe.
For two years these seventy people were con-
fined in two rooms and allotted an unspeakably
miserable fare. Severe epidemics broke out
among them, yet thanks to the common faith,
the common joy in the midst of desolation, and
to the devoted nursing given the sick by their
unstricken fellows, the ill-treatment carried off
only six members. The ecclesiastical and political
hatred aroused by the Bahai teaching penetrated
to the prophet's little company in many forms.
Their dead were left uncared for among them
until the burial expenses were paid and repaid
time and again, and communications made by
Baha'o'llah to the Sultan, protesting against the
despicable treatment inflicted upon women and

HISTORY OF THE BAHAI MOVEMENT 167

children remained undelivered. Yet by the
uniform kindness and fairness the Bahais dis-
played toward each other and toward their
keepers, the military discipline little by little was
relaxed, and Baha'o'llah was finally permitted to
take a house in town, though still within the
fortifications. Even there, however, he was
confined in one room for seven years. Gradually
the Bahais were released on parole, and permitted
to form a settlement of their own in the town.
The world has no community like the Bahai
community at Akka. The colony was con-
tinually recruited from the East, by men whose
spiritual sympathy drew them to this point and
centre of religious life. The community, accord-
ingly, has been composed of individuals belong-
ing to religions inherently opposed and fanatic,
to nations and castes historically hostile, to
environments which had necessitated totally
different ideas and customs ; but within the new
spiritual and social synthesis of Bahaism they
found their interests mutual and interdependent.
For forty years no judge has had to settle dis-
putes between them. The American and Euro-
pean visitors there have found themselves
surrounded by a truer fraternity, a deeper sym-

168 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

pathy, a more vigorous religious spirit than they
can experience in their own towns. It is a
projection of Baha'o'llah's revelation upon the
actual world.

From 1869 to 1892, the prophet was chiefly
concerned with writing his doctrinal works.
Hitherto, his teaching had spread by means of
letters written to his distant disciples and to
those who applied for the resolution of meta-
physical and ethical problems. From 1869 until
his death, Baha'o'llah revealed the moral and
sociological principles which control the world's
development. Sometimes in the language and
symbolism of orthodox Christianity or Moham-
medanism, sometimes in the style of Sufi, or
free thinker, he brought to light those mysterious
laws which, hidden from the ordinary being in
the vast operation of social evolution, contain
the true and creative relationship of individual
and society. On May 28, 1892, at the age of
seventy-five, his work entirely done, Baha'o'llah
died, in full enjoyment of his powers and faculties
to the end. It was our own conscience, our
own aspiration and pure passion for human
betterment, which those prison walls confined
and insulted, but could not destroy.

HISTORY OF THE BAHAI MOVEMENT 169

The confusion, the reaction, and spiritual
division usually attendant upon a prophet's
death were in this case happily prevented.
Baha'o'llah's revelation was literary, not word
of mouth ; and not only does the written word
endure, but it remains free from those variations
of interpretation which memory and changes of
personal mood inevitably throw upon human
speech. Moreover, Baha'o'llah possessed a spirit-
ual as well as natural heir in the person of his
eldest son Abdul Baha, whom shortly before
death he had designated the leader of the Bahai
movement, the " Greatest Branch," who was one
with himself. This succession was entirely
spiritual, since not only does the Bahai teaching
permit no ecclesiastical organization, but Abdul
Baha was so designated for his power and merit,
not his relationship. Our historical outline,
accordingly, continues without interruption down
the life and activity of Baha'o'llah's son.

Abdul Baha (" Servant of Baha ") was bom at
Teheran on May 23, 1844, the day that the Bab
declared his mission. His personality I can best
describe by quoting from the work* of a French

* " The Universal Religion : Bahaism/' by Hippolyte
Dreyfus. London, 1909. Cope and Fenwick.

170 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

author among the Europeans best informed on
the whole subject of Bahaism. " He had con-
stantly been with his father, sharing his suffering
since earliest childhood, also profiting more than
all the others by the marvellous power which
emanated from Baha'o'llah's person. Endowed
with a captivating charm, with an eloquence
which made his conversation sought after by his
most irreducible adversaries, he joined to the in-
domitable energy inherited from his father quite
a personal gentleness, combined with that par-
ticular tact sometimes possessed by Orientals,
which straightway makes them equal to any
situation. With the son of Baha'o'llah, these
qualities, united to the power of self-mastery
which . . . can alone render us master of others,
have made of him one of the strongest and at
the same time most seductive mentalities which
can be imagined. His unique intelligence is
capable of seizing at the first glance all the
aspects of a question, and without hesitation
seeing its solution ; his heart attracts all the
disinterested of life, who feel themselves in-
stinctively drawn towards him."

After forty years of imprisonment, Abdul
Baha was released by the action of the Sultan,

HISTORY OF THE BAHAI MOVEMENT 171

Abdul Hamid, who re-established the Constitu-
tion of 1876 and freed all the political prisoners
of the empire. Since Baha'o'llah's death in
1892, Abdul Baha, the perfect Bahai, has not
only personified Bahaism as the new relationship
of man to society, as well as its emphasis of the
Christian relationship of man to God, but he has
effectively spread the Bahai message through
Asia, Europe, and America.

It is difficult to realize at first how this could
be done by a prisoner without money, political
influence, or an ecclesiastical organization.
Abdul Baha's imprisonment was not like that of
the "prisoner of the Vatican," it was like the
apostle's incarceration, whom Heaven itself un-
chained to promote the divine purpose. Slowly,
yet effectively, like the movement of a mighty
glacier down the valley, or like the waves show-
ing the tide's turning, this revelation went out
from the dungeon into the eager hearts and
minds -of men. To Abdul Baha, as to a teacher
and friend, came men and women from every
race, religion, and nation, to sit at his table like
favoured guests, questioning him about the
social, spiritual, or moral problem each had most
at heart ; and after a stay lasting from a few

172 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

hours to many months, returning home inspired,
renewed, and enlightened. The world surely
never possessed such a guest-house as this.
Within its doors the rigid castes of India melted
away, the racial prejudice of Jew, Christian, and
Mohammedan became less than a memory ;
every convention save the essential law of warm
hearts and aspiring minds broke down, banned
and forbidden by the unifying sympathy of the
master of the house. It was like a King Arthur
and the Round Table, to compare it with the
traditional social ideal best known in our civiliza-
tion ; but an Arthur who knighted women as
well as men, and sent them away not with the
sword, but the Word. A few thousands, per-
haps, from Europe and America ; a few
thousands from the East ; but these form a
company bound by a great enthusiasm, a great
faith, and a great gratitude. And while the
visitors were spreading the teaching among
friends by word of mouth, by pamphlet, by
volume, Abdul Baha answered the myriad letters
written by those unable to come. For years he
has made use of six or more interpreters and
secretaries, rising soon after midnight to begin
his long dictation ; holding in his mind, like a

HISTORY OF THE BAHAI MOVEMENT 173

great chess player, the continuity of many letters,
addressing now one secretary, now another,
always responsive to his own inward necessity
for meditation and prayer. Thus are composed
the letters "tablets," as they are called among
the Bahais which have gone out through the
world, each one containing the solution of a
personal problem together with a strong impulse
toward that spiritual activity wherein all personal
difficulties adjust themselves. In every response,
Abdul Baha assumes the point of view of his
correspondent, and employs the religious and
philosophical terminology most familiar to his en-
vironment, answering, that is, as the questioner's
own spirit would answer if it possessed more con-
scious activity. By his power to penetrate to
that centre of personality at which every man's
nature is open to conviction, Abdul Baha treats
with all men on a plane apart, and convinces
doubt or removes prejudice by making the mind
work through to its own solution.

His life passed in this continually increasing
activity of speech and correspondence, with
merely the change from Akka to Haifa and
from Haifa to Alexandria, until the month of
August, 1911, when he travelled westward to

174 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

visit London and Paris. He had been officially
invited to represent the Bahai movement at the
Universal Races Congress, held at London in
July, 1911, but was unable to attend. A paper
on the Bahai revelation, however, written by
Abdul Baha, was delivered during the session
devoted to "General Conditions of Progress";
and a reviewer afterward pointed out that this
paper was the only one which presented a
spiritual solution of racial problems, offering
spiritual unity as the greatest human ideal, to
be attained by using economic and political
factors merely as the means for that end. In all
other papers these factors were treated as ends
in themselves. After a short stay at Thonon,*
on Lake Leman, Abdul Baha continued his
journey to London, arriving there during the
first week in September. It is unnecessary to
detail his manifold activities during the month
spent there, or during the following months
spent at Paris. Most conspicuous were his
meeting with Mr. R. J. Campbell, when both
men displayed complete sympathy and under-
standing; his address to Mr. Campbell's con-
gregation from the pulpit of the People's

* See Appendix I.

HISTORY OF THE BAHAI MOVEMENT 175

Temple ; his address to the congregation of
Archdeacon Wilberforce at St. John's, West-
minster ; and a breakfast with the Lord Mayor.
Daily he was visited by scores of men and
women ; frequent meetings were held at which
was abundantly released that impelling spirit
ever felt when religion is realized as a social
virtue ; and he continued his correspondence
with Bahais in other countries. The one im-
portant fact underlying this London visit is that
all the modern sociological activity expressed by
the Universal Races Congress, and all the
modern passion for spiritual being expressed
by the liberal Christianity of Mr. Campbell,
Mr. Lewis, and Dr. Orchard, unite once and for
all in Bahaism and focus perfectly in the person
of Abdul Baha. In Paris, as would be expected,
the meetings at his apartment were more cosmo-
politan, including Hindus, Parsees, Persians,
Arabs, Germans, Russians, English, French, and
Americans. As London emphasized the social
and spiritual aspects of Bahaism, so Paris
revealed its intellectual content and unparalleled
power of definition. It is this inclusiveness, of
course, this sheer synthetic impulse vibrating
from the Bahai teaching which enables Abdul

176 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

Baha to speak with equal authority to members
of the French Academy and the Sorbonne
Faculty as to an inter-racial congress, or the
congregation of an active Christian church.
After meeting more than one hundred and fifty
persons daily for two months, besides lecturing
before the Theosophical Society, at the Union
des Spiritualistes, and at Pasteur Wagner's
Church, he returned to Egypt in December,
1911, promising to spend the following year in
travel throughout the United States.

Meanwhile the Persian- American Educational
Society, founded at Washington, D.C., as the
result of Bahai influence to bring about closer
and more sympathetic relations between East
and West, made every effort to give this journey
a deep and widespread effect. When Abdul
Baha arrived at New York in April, 1912, more
than thirty public addresses had already been
arranged for various cities throughout the Union.
The first speech was delivered at the Church of
the Ascension at New York City, and inspired
a series of favourable articles in the metropolitan
press. From New York he proceeded to Wash-
ington, from thence to Chicago, and during the
following seven months visited a score of cities

HISTORY OF THE BAHAI MOVEMENT 177

from coast to coast. At one centre he gave the
Message to a slum audience ; at another he spoke
on equal suffrage before a national meeting of
the Daughters of the American Revolution ; at a
third interpreted the real meaning of the coming
of Christ to the congregation of a Jewish syna-
gogue. He spoke on peace to the New York
Peace Society, on international arbitration at
the Lake Mohonk Conference, on the philosophy
of religion to New Thought Clubs. To Free-
masons, University students, Esperantists, Mor-
mons, he made addresses suited to the audience
and the occasion, using each meeting as a local
fulcrum to further the universal cause. Among
the incidents standing out in deeper relief are
the laying of the cornerstone for the Bahai
Temple of Unity at Chicago, and a visit made
to Mr. W. J. Bryan, the present Secretary of
State, at Lincoln, Nebraska, returning the visit
Mr. Bryan paid Abdul Baha in Akka during
the former's journey around the world. It is a
matter of record that the Secretary afterwards
wrote that the Bahai Movement is the only
power able to revive the Islamic world, little
imagining how soon that power would penetrate

his own civilization.

12

178 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

On December 5 Abdul Baha sailed for
England, where he passed six weeks in London,
Liverpool, and Edinburgh. After two months
in Paris, spent as before in daily interviews and
conferences, he proceeded to Stuttgart, and held
a number of very successful meetings among the
loyal Bahais of Germany ; thence to Buda Pesth
and Vienna, founding new centres in these places.
During May, 1913, he will return to his home at
Haifa, to leave it, in all probability, no more.
Future historians will give Abdul Baha's journey
the detail and the reflection it deserves ; but a
mere outline, in relation to the preceding study,
reveals even now something of its unique im-
portance. " Ambassador to Humanity " was the
expression used by one present at an address in
Washington, and this title is perhaps as descrip-
tive as any to hand. But how different the
mission, how different the method, how dif-
ferent the man ! If any generation could dis-
tinguish out, while still living, the nature most
richly and most potently endowed with its best
forces, ours has that privilege. In Abdul Baha
we have a mirror focusing all that is most signifi-
cant, suppressing all that is irrelevant, of our time.
Thus briefly I have traced the Bahai revela-

HISTORY OF THE BAHAI MOVEMENT 179

tion from its origin in the prophecy of the Bab,
its manifestation by the Prophet Baha'o'llah,
through its propagation by Abdul Baha. Baha-
ism is now by no means confined to one
personality or one region. The relation of
the local reform movement in Persia to this
world -wide teaching is simply that of the
bent bow, which shoots abroad the penetrating
arrow of truth. A cross-section of the human
tree, tentatively made on May 1, 1913, shows
that the Bahai influence has been felt in all the
chief branches. The result of such an analysis
will be approximate only, since the Bahais
possess no ecclesiastical organization, and have no
desire for census and display. Persia itself, to its
eternal credit, contains more than a million
believers. Adherence to the cause nowhere else
implies so much courage and steadfastness.
Though tolerating neither priesthood nor ecclesi-
asticism, the Bahai revelation makes ample
provision for social control of its teaching. For
every city it defines a special organization to
unite the followers, instruct them in practical
social work, concentrate their activity, and renew
their vision. A typical Bahai assembly, then,
consists of a House of Justice a body of nine

180 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

men, elected by men and women alike, to counsel
and advise in all matters of doubt and urgency
a reading-room, open to the public, contain-
ing the works of Baha'o'llah, Abdul Baha, and
literature relating to the cause ; classes of
instruction, held freely for all desiring to learn
the meaning and importance of this revelation ;
meetings for Bahais, at which are read tablets
from Abdul Baha, new Bahai literature, com-
munications from other assemblies, and at which
speeches are delivered, especially by Bahai
travellers; and finally those meetings the
essential Bahai religious service where are read
the words of Baha'o'llah. No order nor precedent
between persons or the sexes is observed, and
the Bahai services resemble those of the Quakers
more than any other religious gathering known
to our environment. The cause is propagated
in the natural manner, by those who are moved
to serve by their own impulse. Baha'o'llah
taught the spiritual responsibility of every being,
which renders the intervention of a paid mediating
clergy not only unnecessary and impertinent, but
essentially corruptive ; and he taught that every
man and woman, becoming filled by true faith
and love, are naturally empowered to communi-

HISTORY OF THE BAHAI MOVEMENT 181

cate their new being to others ; and that every
type, class, and environment, can only be reached
by its own kind. Every man carries within him
the seeds of his own springtime ; and every
environment contains all the tools required for
its own reform. In the case of both individuals
and environments, the outside world can only
provide the essential preliminary instruction.

Such assemblies or centres, deviating from
type according to local circumstances, exist in
great numbers throughout Persia, Southern
Russia, India, Burma, and Egypt, where their
membership includes every class, people, and
sect. In the West, Bahai centres have been
established in Germany, France, and England,
with unorganized but increasing sentiment in
Italy and Russia; while in America, as the
history of the development of religious freedom
would have foretold, Bahaism is especially strong.
No other race has evolved so far from the
deadening influence of dogma and orthodoxy,
thanks to the westward impulse of popular
liberty ; yet, on the other hand, no people have
so completely lost the clue to mysticism and
personal religious vision. Opportunity and need,
therefore, meet in particularly close contact

182 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

throughout the United States and Canada the
rapid spread of the Bahai teaching proves its
capacity to satisfy the Western hunger for the
spiritual life. In the United States more than
thirty cities possess assemblies, and a constant
stream of liberalizing and invigorating thought
circulates from city to city and from State to
State. To summarize, we find that Bahaism has
taken active root from California eastward to
Japan, and from Edinburgh south to Cape Town.
Considering the ties which bind all the
assemblies into one firm and devoted cause,
we realize that they are not ecclesiastical, like
those which enclose Catholic parishes within one
empire of religious absolutism, neither are they
ritualistic, like the Masonic fraternity, but in the
fullest sense of the word they are social, includ-
ing both political and spiritual necessities. Each
assembly, that is, constitutes a centre where
men and women engage actively in releasing
the sociological forces which tend to unite
nations, races, and religions into one humanity,
and by learning to serve evolution they are
hastening the divine civilization of the world.
For Bahaism is not an isolated social fragment,
badly adjusted to the myriad fragments pulling

HISTORY OF THE BAHAI MOVEMENT 183

mankind in every direction at once; it is a
ferment actively at work within the fragments
themselves, the expression of our modern passion
for unity and reform. Every assembly is like an
atlas, which in little space represents the world.

The question arises whether, since the Bahai
revelation excludes a clergy, it thereby excludes
the Church. That an inspiring Church can
exist without priesthood we know from the
experience of the Quakers ; and from their
history also we know that a Church of some
kind is a positive necessity to secure communal
firmness and power. Realizing all the advan-
tages the Church offers its people, Baha'ollah
left full instructions for the foundation of a
temple in every community. The idea under-
lying the Bahai temple is so simple, yet so pro-
found, that well-informed readers will at once
perceive that the temple, like every other mani-
festation of the Bahai teaching, represents the
climax of a social evolution perceptible in every
phase of contemporary thought. In the beau-
tiful Persian imagery, which even translation
cannot obscure, Baha'ollah named this temple
the Mashrah - el - Azkar (" Dawning-place of
Prayer"). The building itself is a nine-sided

184 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

structure, surmounted by a lofty dome, and
enclosed by gardens. The place of worship
occupies the heart of the temple, underneath
the dome, and is to be open at all hours, to
all people, for meditation and silent prayer. The
holy words of Baha'o'llah are chanted at intervals,
but no other form of worship, and no more
extensive ritual is permitted. About the hall
of worship are grouped various institutions of
public service, all an integral part of the temple.
These consist of a college, a hospital, a hospice,
and other organizations of public social benefit.
The inner significance of such a temple can be
gratefully appreciated by all. It means, first,
the recovery and development of spiritual
activity by the individual man and woman,
independent of the traditional tyrannies of priest,
Church, or book ; it means, next, the translation
of personal holiness and aspiration into social
service, the instruction and participation of men
and women in the common task of reform the
union, that is to say, after their long estrange-
ment, of Church and State, upon the basis of true
democracy.

A temple completely carrying out these ideas
has recently been erected at Echkabad, in Russian

HISTORY OF THE BAHAI MOVEMENT 185

Turkistan. In the West, Bahai activity has
concentrated upon the construction of a similar
holy place in Chicago. At the date of writing,
a site has been secured overlooking Lake
Michigan, and preliminary work is going for-
ward upon the grounds. Once again, as in
estimating the power of the Bahai revelation
by the reception officially accorded Baha'o'llah's
proclamation to the governments in 1868, we
must not consider the material, but the spiritual
content for our standard of judgment. It means
nothing derogatory to the cause, therefore, that
this temple has not arisen with the inconsequential
ease of a Carnegie Library. On the contrary,
we are forced to realize how relatively little con-
trol the Western conscience has retained upon its
economic activity, and gratefully acknowledge
the presence of even so much disinterestedness
in our civilization. It is a matter for public
record that the Bahai temple at Chicago has
received the first contribution ever made by the
East to a Western activity ; and no thoughtful
man or woman need be told that by its con-
struction will be released a uniting and creative
social force such as flows from no other institution
of our time.

PART VI
THE BAHAI TEACHING SUMMARIZED

VI

BAHAISM, then, is a religious movement ; but it
cannot be compared with any previous move-
ment, either in its purpose, its method, or its
result. It had a local origin in Mohammedan
Persia ; it was a reaction, first of all, against an
immediate condition ; and in so much it is like
other religious movements like Luther's Re-
formation, for example. But if we once perceive
the essential difference between Bahaism and the
Reformation, in purpose, method, and results, we
shall have entered into the very heart of this
modern revelation. The Protestant Reformation
implied the breaking away from an old order and
the setting up of a new. The old order, however,
had enough both of truth and vitality to persist,
with the result that Europe is divided into two
hostile religions. No man can be both Catholic
and Protestant without withdrawing from both

187

188 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

organizations and, for all practicable social pur-
poses, becoming neither Protestant nor Catholic.
This alternative, then, is presented to every man:
that he must accept one Church and consequently
reject the other, or reject both and consequently
lose all the advantages of co-operation with
men. The alternative is hateful, vicious, and
destructive, for it prevents society from enjoying
the advantages of a united Church, and the
individual from sharing in that deeper and more
valuable truth which is now broken and divided
into two ineffective parts ; yet the alternative
is as inevitable as it is hateful, and no man
can elect a compromise and retain his religion on
a social basis.

If Bahaism represented any such tendency
toward disruption and division, it would be no
more than another sect struggling for existence
and survival in the merciless jungle of society ;
but its purpose and method of operation combine
to render further disintegration impossible. Its
purpose is to effect the complete ultimate re-
conciliation of every existing social fragment,
both religious and political, and its method of
operation consists in taking its stand within the
institution, not outside, and pointing out the true

THE BAHAI TEACHING SUMMARIZED 189

road of development along which the institution,
by its own doctrines, if religious, or responsibility,
if political, is committed to go. It is, therefore,
not hostile to any creed, sect, or nation ; but is
hostile only to that fatal prejudice, bigotry, and
blindness which prevent creeds, sects, and nations
from realizing the purpose of their own origin.
Bahaism is not the enemy of any Church, for its
ideal of human unity and co-operation places its
hostages in every race, Church, and nation on
earth ; but Bahaism is the determined and en-
lightened foe of anti-evolutional forces. This
must be understood first of all. To the Christian,
accordingly, the Bahai teaching brings an obliga-
tion to remain within the Church and to obey
more fully, not less fully, the Gospel of Christ.
But it does not leave him the same man as he
was. It reinterprets the Christian mysteries and
morals in the light of evolution and unity. The
eternal virtue love, for example it strips of its
local and confining manifestation, showing how
that form of spiritual activity cannot be directed
to members of one class, Church, or race alone,
but must be directed to all men in equal measure.
The existing religious situation attempts to con-
fine eternal forces to narrow social areas ; but

190 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

Bahaism breaks down the frontiers that cut off
one area from another.

The Bahai teaching has what may be termed
three moralities. It has, first, a personal morality,
then a morality for institutions, and last of all
a morality for society as a whole. We may take
up these moralities (or, rather, these three ex-
pressions of the same morality) one by one.

THE INDIVIDUAL.

We might define the Bahai teaching as to the
personal life by stating that it is the Christian
ideal, emphasized and vitalized by the purity of
another prophet's vision ; but this would neces-
sitate a common agreement as to what Christian-
ity really is. We have too many kinds of
Christianity, unfortunately, to trust the general
opinion on this matter ; yet beyond and outside
the traditional Churches there exists a very en-
lightened attitude, which represents the modern
social conscience.

Bahaism insists upon the sanctity of the in-
dividual, the personal right and duty to disallow
any vicarious spiritual agency. Each man and
woman constitutes a divine creation, and possesses
a potential worth not impeached, denied, nor

THE BAHAI TEACHING SUMMARIZED 191

humbled by that of any other human being.
Self-expression, accordingly, represents the su-
preme obligation and privilege ; and God has not
given His precious marble of opportunity to the
Michael Angelo alone. Life offers every person-
ality the means of beautiful expression, in noble
conduct, great thought, or inspiring art. In this
individual potentiality and impulse toward self-ex-
pression, all men are created free and equal. It is
not too much to aver that the greater the mind and
spirit, the greater the tendency to respect and
admire other personalities, however they may be
rated by the world ; and the inability to recognize
a transcendent and incomparable possibility in
every person, must be accepted as the stigma of
spiritual insufficiency. Those distinctions, classifi-
cations, and judgments which separate society into
unsympathetic fragments, proceed from the in-
tellect alone ; but intellect itself, when enlightened
and vitalized by spirit, gladly perceives and adores
the personality latent within all.

Upon the individual, then, Bahaism enjoins
his spiritual development as the purpose, and
hence the supreme obligation, of life. For
Baha'o'llah, also, came not to destroy but to
fulfil; and while his life is a scourge terribly

192 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

uplifted against those who pollute the temple,
the essential redemptory spirit of religion, as
contained in pure Christianity, he reveals anew,
with added intensity and clearness. Bahaism
teaches that without spiritual activity all personal
and social effort is sterile or self-destructive.
Legislation not derived from religious vision,
laws unfounded upon unselfish wisdom, merely
obstruct our social evolution, and must be revised
continually at uncountable vexation and expense.
In his private life, moreover, the individual meets
with ultimate failure if his physical and intellect-
ual faculties are uncontrolled by the conscious
soul. The brute-world of mere flesh and blood,
and the intellectual world of mere atheism, how-
ever brilliant and effective they may appear,
have upon the spiritual plane no reality, and
hence neither significance nor permanence.
Body and mind serve only as environment
agencies to soul, which has no need of them
beyond this life. The immortality of soul and
the omnipotent love of God constitute the
foundations of the Bahai theology. Inasmuch
as health and education affect the soul's useful-
ness and power of development, they must be
sought, in their highest possible state, by every

THE BAHAI TEACHING SUMMARIZED 193

man and woman. Spirituality without physical
or intellectual force is like the swordless warrior
or a light without atmosphere. All that is
requisite for self-development must be obtained
and made use of. There is no essential virtue in
poverty the rich man who employs his resources
for health, education, and cultivation through
travel and the intercourse which leisure makes
possible, so long as he submits his talents to the
directing control of spiritual activity, receives
the assurance of Bahaism that his life is lived
wisely and well. For society may confidently
reckon upon this fact, that when the soul
assumes authority over any human being, his
personality and social advantages will thence-
forth be put to public service. The greater he
is in himself, and the richer he is in the world,
the more power and responsibility accrue to the
disposal of evolution. The point at which
wealth either stupefies the soul or ceases to be
serviceable to its needs, must be determined by
the individual. Here again may society take
confidence ; for the soul that once awakens to
self- consciousness will feel more concern over its
material possession than even the bitterest
Socialist. The other point, the point at which

13

194 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

poverty deprives the man of opportunity and
influence, this point, also, must be determined
each for himself.

The phenomenon underlying these facts is
that spiritual activity transfers the centre of con-
sciousness from self- that is, from the empire of
body and mind, to an outside point. This
transfer automatically changes egoism into ser-
vice, releasing the world-old human passion for
self-preservation and happiness, and turning its
power along unselfish channels. The Bahai
teaching, therefore, in its reference to the
personal relationships of life, only defines and
explains the operation of spiritual evolution.
Authorized by its truth to eternal forces it
demands, on the part of the believer, the utmost
sympathy for others. It is for no man or
woman to insult and despise the creations of
Almighty God. The sanctity of the individual,
as a spiritual fact, has its obvious counterpart
in daily life, since, as we have already seen,
the wretched maladjustments of our political and
economic necessity derive directly from the
mutual prejudice or indifference of men.

Bahaism is equally explicit concerning the
relationship of the individual to society. He

THE BAHAI TEACHING SUMMARIZED 195

must sunder every tie inherently selfish, de-
structive, or useless ; but he must bring new
enthusiasm and faith to every necessary or con-
structive relationship, and to existing responsi-
bilities bring a deeper vision of their significance.
He must not withdraw from present religious
organizations, but reinterpreting their function
in the light of evolution, endeavour to vitalize
their activity, and remove the prejudice and
ignorance walling them off from the social unity.
As a citizen, he is bound to obey the laws of
his country, whether just or foolish, labouring
always, by constitutional means, to align the
civil organization with creative forces and social
evolution. He must labour to unite minor
organizations in order to make them effective ;
and to transfer the circumference of social con-
sciousness from the city to the province, the
province to the State, the State to the continent,
and from the continent to the world. To render
himself effective, he must study the social
problem through the most advanced ideas in
science, economics, and government ; and no
duty is so important for the believer as to create
for his own mind a living, passionate social ideal
a picture of the divine civilization described

196 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

by Baha'o'llah and Abdul Baha toward which
his purpose may direct its activity, and from
which his will may be strengthened and revived.

THE INSTITUTION

Ethics have progressed steadily in modern
times from personal morality to morality on a
larger scale. With increasing resentment men
perceive the futility of private morality, main-
tained under terrible pressure, allied with frank
immorality on the part of institutions. Honesty
in Church members represents a spectacle of
tragic ludicrousness, when the Churches are
guilty of dishonesty as institutions. What avail,
likewise, is peaceableness in citizens if nations
cannot refrain from war? If Bahaism were
confined to mere personal problems, it would for
the most part be offering kindergarten instruction
to grown men; for the ideal of personal virtue
has become our racial inheritance, and has passed
into our unconscious natures as a continual
impulse ; while the failure to achieve personal
integrity reveals an unfavourable social environ-
ment, not an unwilling or untaught individual.

The Bahai teaching, then, takes up the more
pressing moral problem, and directs itself to a

THE BAHAI TEACHING SUMMARIZED 197

great extent toward the larger social unit, the
institution. Social ethics possess the same
foundation as personal morality enlightened
self-interest. Its method is to re-direct the
instinct of self-preservation, which is as strong
in institutions as in individuals. Every religious
and political unit, in fighting desperately for its
own maintenance and prosperity, insures a hostile
reaction from all the rest of society. The bow
and arrows which involve continual danger are
no longer carried by the individual, but by the
institution. Bahaism makes the same appeal to
the institution that Christ made to the man to
drop its offensive and defensive weapons, and
entertain absolutely no thought of itself. Let
Churches exert themselves to assist the religious
life in men and women, without any effort to
stamp that religious life with the parochial and
sectarian label. It is not enough to be a
Protestant one must be a Christian ; and it is
not enough to be a Christian one must be a
religious man or woman, unlabelled, unconfined.
The unselfish attitude toward society insures a
creative and co-operative reaction from every
other social unit. No man except the outlaw
plots against the unarmed man ; no institution

198 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

except the outlawed institution plots against
the organization whose purpose and activity
is inherently and wholly expressed in human
service. The Red Cross Society and the Salva-
tion Army, hospitably received by every civilized
nation, prove this point.

The political units are controlled by the same
laws. Fortified frontiers insure hostility and
danger from the world ; international peace
insures co-operation. Unlike the Churches,
however, the nations are justified in maintaining
the machinery of defence until disarmament has
become a general movement. Our most power-
ful social forces, fortunately, are already devoted
to disarmament as an international ethic ; and
the Bahai teaching assists such efforts by its
unparalleled effectiveness in presenting the solu-
tion clearly and irresistibly, and in uniting under
one head the yet unco-ordinated institutions
reflecting the common desire.

To sum up what I have termed its morality
for institutions, Bahaism teaches that the pros-
perity and permanence of any religious or
political organization is not the end for our
personal loyalty; that we should be indifferent
to the welfare of mere institutions, creeds, stone

THE BAHAI TEACHING SUMMARIZED 199

walls, and iron conventions ; but that our most
vigorous and devoted loyalty belongs to the
cause of humanity as represented by the needs
of every environment. We owe a kind of
loyalty, then, to institutions ; but only to the
extent to which they serve men and women.
To selfish institutions, to outworn organizations,
we owe no loyalty ; but must learn to distinguish
between the constructive and the obstructive,
and resolutely leave the dead to bury their dead.

SOCIETY

The Bahai teaching goes far beyond the code
of ethics already formulated by our civilization.
Did its message stop here, it would have value,
and great value, by aligning the religious impulse
with the most advanced social morality ; but it
would not merit consideration as the modern
revelation. Its claim to this all-important title is
based upon the morality Baha'o'llah formulated
for society as a whole.

The advance toward civilization is marked by
the ever-expanding field of consciousness set up
in the average mind. The frontiers of morality
are not bounded by the amount of possible good
or evil in men, but by the area included within

200 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

the daily workings of intelligence. This fact
should be realized to its full value, for without
social consciousness the consciousness, that is,
whose visible expression is law, as the visible
expression of personal consciousness is character
there can be no more community between men
than the interminable and paralyzing hostility of
rank vegetation in a jungle. This area can be
increased in two directions, by intensifying the
individual's consciousness of his own soul, and
by enriching his consciousness of other lives and
other environments. In the past, religion took
upon itself only the first method, which operating
by itself isolates men by situating each one in
a Holy of Holies. Most social forces are now
working in the other direction, and the modern
world brings the greater pressure to develop our
social rather than our personal consciousness.
While social consciousness, however, was con-
fined to the individual's immediate environment,
none of the disastrous effects caused by mere
personal morality were apparent, and ethics
accordingly remained limited and confined.
Probably the greatest force available to pierce
the social consciousness and reveal the play of
society on a larger scale has been the Church.

THE BAHAI TEACHING SUMMARIZED 201

The Church, however, broke through the frontiers
of experience in only one direction ; and while
teaching a broader morality, which linked men of
the same faith in widely different environments,
it set up even stricter boundaries than before
between men of different faith living in the same
environment. The civilizing work, however,
was initiated ; men began to think in terms of
more than one environment ; and nationalization,
that social force alone surpassing the ecclesiastical
influence, operated in a manner tending to shatter
the localizing frontiers flung up by the Church.
Our experience, that is, learned clearly that men
of the same natural geographical or racial division
owe a loyalty to that division, transcending
religious considerations, under constraint of the
common necessity for self-defence. Thus men
were compelled to realize, in times of crisis, that
the social area created by Christianity was not
inclusive enough to permit the establishment and
maintenance of the necessary political machinery.
The army, accordingly, served to introduce into
our racial consciousness just those elements of
experience which the Church would willingly
have destroyed ; and the continual stress exerted
by the inevitable rivalry of these two civilizing

202 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

agencies has given the modern man a social
consciousness whose area increases yearly with
tremendous velocity, yet which is still broken in
two by a certain loyalty to the contradictory
claims of Church and State.

Yet the point has been reached where the evil
effects of institutional immorality are more and
more painfully felt in our daily life, and where
the correspondence between personal morality,
as formulated by Christ, and social necessity,
as being formulated by economics, is declaring
itself to all. At this transitional condition, the
Bahai teaching offers, fully developed, that
universal social consciousness in which a new
social morality can develop. To enter into the
revelation of Baha'o'llah is to discard for ever
the old parochial consciousness and absorb a
consciousness race-wide and world-deep. In this
field of experience the last conflicting element
is done away. Co-operation displaces com-
petition, and the eternal impulse toward love
is supplied its ethical definition in the modern
ideal of unity. Baha'o'llah created a common
circumference for the local consciousness of
every nation, race, and religion. He created
the experience whose visible expression is a self-

THE BAHAI TEACHING SUMMARIZED 203

conscious human society. For the first time,
men from every environment can enter into one
faith and identify themselves with a movement
including all men and women.

Hand in hand with its self-consciousness goes
the new social morality. With experience is
born responsibility, and the practical form our
common responsibility must take is stated in
Baha'ollah's works. Every step from the present
competitive order to the future order of co-opera-
tion has been provided for ; existing institutions
and actual tendencies are merely employed with
one conscious purpose, and no man is precipitated
over the edge of an ideal impossible to realize
in daily life. The supreme manifestation of
social morality is always government, and in
formulating a politic, Baha'o'llah most clearly
earned our reverence as the prophet of modern
society.

By uniting the aristocratic spirit with the
democratic form of government, he insured a
politic at once equable and effective. It was
long ago realized by Western historians that
under a democratic State, inspired by the aristo-
cratic spirit, society has revealed its noblest
attributes. Democracy alone tends to vulgarize

204 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

personal values, as the United States proves,
while aristocracy alone tends not only to oppress
the productive classes, but to sterilize the ruling
caste itself. The principle of representation
insures justice to each and to all, and likewise
the personal authority of superior men insures
the precious leaven of magnanimity and idealism.
Universal suffrage and personal superiority meet
in the Bahai House of Justice. Every town
elects as its local House of Justice the nine men
best qualified for legislative, judicial, and execu-
tive labour. The government of the county or
province will be administered by a county or
provincial House of Justice, and a national
House of Justice, composed of abler men as
its scope of operation increases, will preside over
the State, with an international House of Justice,
most important of all, to act upon those increas-
ing problems which transcend the function of the
national government. The House of Justice,
indeed, whether intended for town or State,
represents the outcome of our present political
evolution, and BahaVllah has only defined and
sanctified for men the idea already strongly
though bewilderingly felt, that senates and parlia-
ments are breaking down under the pressure

THE BAHAI TEACHING SUMMARIZED 205

of modern social necessity, and that public con-
trol is best secured by board or commission
government.

In the flux of social evolution, while popula-
tions, environments, and institutions continually
change, there exists only one steadfast and
enduring point of contact between the individual
man and woman, and this impersonal, irresistible
force we call society. This point is not the
institution, whether political or religious, for the
introduction of new economic factors into the
social stream during every generation necessitates
a new personal need, and consequently a new
balance of forces. The institution is too in-
elastic ; it imprisons our growth as much as it
benefits us. The one factor which is both
permanent and elastic is office, and the supreme
adequacy represented by the Bahai House of
Justice cannot be realized until this fact is under-
stood. Political divisions change, but humanity
remains, and the link between the generations
is maintained only by the integrity and respon-
sibility of public office. Office transcends the
individual, yet when properly established it uses
him to the full extent of his ability. Authority,
therefore, which is the most important attribute

206 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

in the possession of society, must be intelligently
spent, for an adequate return, by each genera-
tion, and the election of superior men, to offices
whose integrity is a matter of universal concern,
insures vitality in government, and consequently
a social morality which shall invigorate the
individual.

Bahaism desires a new social order in which
the development of spiritualized men and women
shall be the primary purpose ; not supermen,
whose nature is essentially hostile to the many,
but that order of free beings representing our
own ideals achieved in daily life and common
things. To such an order we already potentially
belong, and the highest human fellowship the
earth will ever contain will not be otherwise
than our own kind, released and inspired by
participation in a co-operative society.

This summary of the Bahai teaching is
altogether too brief, yet in a work designed
only to draw lines of connection between the
present political and religious situation and this
divine revelation, I have succeeded, I hope, in
preparing the mind for a sympathetic study of
its rich and fruitful message, and in offering an
outline to be filled in by further investigation.

THE BAHAI TEACHING SUMMARIZED 207

The Bahai attitude is so creative that proofs of
its teaching are visible everywhere in the activity
of men. A special literature, however, is acces-
sible, and I have prepared a bibliography, given
as Appendix III., which may advantageously be
followed, both in its sequence and extent, with a
briefer list of references for those who desire the
essential facts without their historical, philo-
sophical, and religious background.

APPENDICES

APPENDIX I

A PILGRIMAGE TO THONON

" ABDUL BAHA at Thonon, on Lake Leman !" This un-
expected news, telegraphed through the courtesy of
M. Dreyfus, brought my wife and me to the determination
we had long agreed upon of making a pilgrimage to the
Master at our earliest opportunity. With only a few days
intervening before his journey to London, we set out
immediately from our home in Siena, and arrived at
Thonon in the afternoon of August 29. Prepared in some
measure for the meeting by the noble mountain scenery
through which we had passed, we approached the hotel
feeling ourselves strangely aloof from the tourist world. If
I could but look upon Abdul Baha from a distance I con-
sidered that I should fulfil a pilgrim's most earnest desire.
The Hotel du Pare lies in the midst of sweeping lawns.
Groups of people were walking quietly about under the
trees or seated at small tables in the open air. An
orchestra played from a near-by pavilion. My wife caught
sight of M. Dreyfus conversing with others, and pressed
my arm. I looked up quickly. M. Dreyfus had recog-
nized us at the same time, and as the party rose I saw
among them a stately old man, robed in a cream-coloured
gown, his white hair and beard shining in the sun. He
displayed a beauty of stature, an inevitable harmony of
attitude and dress I had never seen nor thought of in men.

211

212 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

Without having ever visualized the Master, I knew that
this was he. My whole body underwent a shock. My
heart leaped, my knees weakened, a thrill of acute, recep-
tive feeling flowed from head to foot. I seemed to have
turned into some most sensitive sense-organ, as if eyes and
ears were not enough for this sublime impression. In every
part of me I stood aware of Abdul Baha's presence. From
sheer happiness I wanted to cry it seemed the most
suitable form of self-expression at my command. While
my own personality was flowing away, even while I ex-
hibited a state of complete humility, a new being, not my
own, assumed its place. A glory, as it were, from the
summits of human nature poured into me, and I was
conscious of a most intense impulse to admire. In Abdul
Baha I felt the awful presence of BahaVllah, and, as my
thoughts returned to activity, I realized that I had thus
drawn as near as man now may to pure spirit and pure
being. This wonderful experience came to me beyond my
own volition. I had entered the Master's presence and
become the servant of a higher will for its own purpose.
Even my memory of that temporary change of being bears
strange authority over me. I know what men can become ;
and that single overcharged moment, shining out from the
dark mountain-mass of all past time, reflects like a mirror
I can turn upon all circumstances to consider their worth
by an intelligence purer than my own.

After what seemed a cycle of existence, this state passed
with a deep sigh, and I advanced to accept Abdul Baha's
hearty welcome. During our two days'* visit, we were
given unusual opportunity of questioning the Master, but
I soon realized that such was not the highest or most
productive plane on which I could meet him. My ques-
tions answered themselves. I yielded to a feeling of
reverence which contained more than the solution of in-

APPENDIX I 213

tellectual or moral problems. To look upon so wonderful
a human being, to respond utterly to the charm of his
presence this brought me continual happiness. I had no
fear that its effects would pass away and leave me un-
changed. I was content to remain in the background.
The tribute which poets have offered our human nature in
its noblest manifestations came naturally to mind as I
watched his gestures and listened to his stately, rhythmic
speech ; and every ideal environment which philosophers
have dreamed to solicit and confirm those manifestations
in him seemed realized. Patriarchal, majestic, strong, yet
infinitely kind, he appeared like some just king that very
moment descended from his throne to mingle with a
devoted people. How fortunate the nation that had such
a ruler ! My personal reverence, a mood unfortunately
rare for a Western man, revealed to me as by an inspira-
tion what even now could be wrought for justice and peace
were reverence made a general virtue ; for among us many
possess the attributes of government would only the
electors recognize and summon them to their rightful
station.

At dinner I had further opportunity of observing Abdul
Baha in his relation to our civilization. The test which
the Orient passes upon the servant of a prophet is spiritual
wisdom ; we concern ourselves more with questions of
power and effectiveness. From their alliance from wis-
dom made effectual, from power grown wise we must
derive the future cosmopolitan virtue. Only now, while
the East and West are exchanging their ideals, is this
consummation becoming possible. Filled with these ideas,
I followed the party of Bahais through the crowded dining-
room. Abdul Baha, even more impressive walking than
seated, led the way. I studied the other guests as we passed.
On no face did I observe idle curiosity or amusement ; on

214 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

the contrary, every glance turned respectfully upon the
Master, and not a few bowed their heads. Our party at
this time included eighteen, of whom some were Orientals.
I could not help remarking the bearing of these
splendid men. A sense of well-being, of keen zest in
the various activities of life without doubt the effect of
their manly faith emanated from all. With this superior-
ity, moreover, they combined a rare grace and social ease.
All were natives of countries in which Bahaism has not
only been a capital offence in the eyes of the law, but the
object of constant popular hatred and persecution ; yet not
one, by the slightest trace of weariness or bitterness,
showed the effects of hardship and wrong upon the soul.
Toward Abdul Baha their attitude was beautifully reverent.
It was the relationship of disciple to master, that associa-
tion more truly educative than any relation our civilization
possesses, since it educates the spirit as well as the intelli-
gence, the heart as well as the mind. Our party took seats
at two adjoining tables. The dinner was throughout cheer-
ful and animated. Abdul Baha answered questions and
made frequent observations on religion in the West. He
laughed heartily from time to time indeed, the idea of
asceticism or useless misery of any kind cannot attach
itself to this fully-developed personality. The divine
element in him does not feed at the expense of the human
element, but appears rather to vitalize and enrich the
human element by its own abundance, as if he had attained
his spiritual development by fulfilling his social relations
with the utmost ardour. Yet, as he paused in profound
meditation, or raised his right hand in that compelling
gesture with which he emphasizes speech, I thought
vividly once more of BahaVllah, whose servant he is, and
could not refrain from comparing this with that other
table at which a prophet broke bread. A deep awe fell

APPENDIX I 215

upon me, and I looked with a sudden pang of compassion
at my fellow-Bahais, for only a few hours before Abdul
Baha had said that even in the West martyrs will be found
for the Cause.

After dinner we gathered in the drawing-room. The
Master's approaching visit to London was mentioned. I
recoiled momentarily as I pictured him surrounded by
the terrible dehumanizing machinery of a modern city.
Nevertheless, I am confident that nowhere else will
BahaVllah's presence in him, as well as the principle of
Bahaism, so conspicuously triumph. Precisely where our
scientific industry has organized ja mechanism so powerful
that we have become its slaves {^precisely where men have
become less than things, and in so dwarfing ourselves have
lost a certain spiritual insistence, a certain necessity to be,
without which our slavery stands lamentably confirmed
precisely there will the essential contrast between spirit
and matter strike the observer most sharply. The true
explanation of our unjust social arrangement does not
consist in the subjection of poor to rich, but the subjection
of all men alike to a pitiless mechanism ; for to become
rich, at least in America, implies merely a readier adapta-
tion to the workings of the machine, a completer adjust-
ment to the revolving wheel. But Abdul Baha rises
superior to every aggregation of material particles. He is
greater than railroads, than skyscrapers, than trusts ; he
dominates finance in its brutalist manifestation. His
spiritual sufficiency, by which our human nature feels
itself vindicated in its acutest agony, convinces one that
the West can free itself from materialism without a social
cataclysm, without civil war, without jealous and intrusive
legislation, by that simplest, most ancient of revolutions,
a change of heart. When by the influx of a new ideal
we withdraw our obedience from the machine, its demoniac

216 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

energy will frighten no more, like a whirlwind that passes
into the open sea. Abdul Baha restores man to his state
a little lower than the angels. Through him we recover
the soul's eternal triumph-chant I Am.

Next day the Bahais, increased by other pilgrims from
various parts of Europe, met again at tea. On this
occasion we new-comers were presented with a Bahai stone
marked with BahaVllah's name. Rightly considered,
such objects contain a spiritual influence quite apart from
the belief of superstition a suggestive value, which,
recalling the circumstances under which the objects are
given and received, actually retain and set free something
of the holy man's personality. Superstition errs in
reckoning their power apart from the receiver's worth or
his power of receptivity. At my request, Abdul Baha
graciously took back the stone I had received, and returned
it with a blessing for my baby girl who thus, as it were,
accompanied us on our pilgrimage and shares its benefits.
I had spent the morning walking about Thonon. Follow-
ing so closely upon my first meeting with the Master and
the unique impression this made upon me, my walk
invested the commonplace of our community life with a
new significance. So much that we accept as inevitable,
both in people and their surroundings, is not only avoid-
able, but to the believer even unendurable ! Yet while
inwardly rebelling against the idle and vicious types, the
disgusting conditions in which our cities abound, I was
conscious of a new sympathy for individuals and a new
series of ties by which all men are joined in one common
\JestinyJ Perhaps the most enduring advantage humanity
derives from its prophets is that in their vision the broken
and misapplied fragments of society are gathered into one
harmony and design. What the historian ignores, what
the economist gives up, the prophet both interprets and

APPENDIX I 217

employs. The least of those who enter into a prophet's
vision become thereafter for ever conscious of the in-
vincible unity of men. Not himself only, but all men
seem to undergo a new birth, a spiritual regenesis.

I have not yet mentioned the presence of Murza Asoud
Ullah. I suffered the good fortune to be seated beside
him at dinner, and was irresistibly attracted by his gentle
and tender spirit. Clothed in the same beautiful Persian
style of garments as Abdul Baha, he represented a strik-
ing contrast with the Master, as if two wines of different
fragrance had been poured into similar glasses. Without
Abdul Baha's majestic qualities, his nature is nevertheless
infinitely sweet and lovable, inspiring a regard not exalted
into impersonal awe, but full of that devotion which
unites the members of a happy family. As we parted
from the Bahais on this last evening, after an impressive
benedictory farewell by Abdul Baha, Murza Asoud Ullah,
with the most touching sweetness, approached my wife
and said that he wanted to be her father ; that if she
ever needed a father's help she must turn to him. Of all
the heart- renewing incidents with which our little pilgrim-
age was brimmed, this was the most affecting, the most
significant ; for it is an example of that religious fellow-
ship, deeper than race, broader than language, which
Bahaism has awakened in both hemispheres, and a
prophecy for the earnest days when Abdul Baha is no
more, and we men and women, heirs of BahaVllah's
manifestation, labour to erect the House of Justice amid
the increasing charity and enthusiasm of the world.

QUATTRO TORBI, SlENA,

September 3, 1911.

APPENDIX II
A PRAYER FOR UNITY

O BAHA'&LLAH, may men no linger act and hope and suffer
apart from one another ! May men no longer be separated
by fear and jealousy and shame, as nations are separated by
strongholds and fortresses ! In our supreme affliction, when
we are utterly bewildered and desolate, may we lament no
more for the loneliness of life but rejoice in its Unity ^
learning with simplicity, with faith, with earnestness to look
for help and consolation in all men, even our enemies. May
we truly feel that every personality overlaps by a little every
other personality, and to that extent is identical with it ;
that every experience overlaps by a little every other ex-
perience, thereby bringing all lives into sympathy; that
men are not so many complete and separate existences, but
are only members of one Body and loves of one Spirit.

Thy manifestation of Unity, O Baha^o^llah, opens the
Divine Garden to all men, even to the least and nameless
outcast. He who enters by thy Gate thereafter shares every
good and beautiful thing. Whoever are rich, this man
benefits equally by their riches; whoever are happy, he
enters into their well-being ; whoever are wise or powerful,
he truly shares that power and wisdom. If a lover whispers
a sweet word to his beloved, this man will hear and be glad.
If a philosopher unveils a new manifestation of God, this

218

APPENDIX II 219

man will behold and worship. No blessing of earth can be
hidden or withheld from him.

O Baha > o' > llah ! teach us that it is better to be crushed
and know Unity than be fortunate and take no heed. Teach
us that the invalid who attains Unity is more capable than
a strong man relying only upon himself; that he who suffers
great pain continually, and learns Unity, is happier than the
gayest of men who knows it not.

Thou art Unity, O Baha'o'llah ! May we love Thee
more than ourselves ! For surely we are not here at all, but
we are in Thee.

APPENDIX III
BIBLIOGRAPHY FOR FURTHER STUDY

A Traveller's Narrative, Written to Illustrate the Episode
of the Bab. E. G. Browne, Cambridge, 1891.

The author, Professor of Oriental Languages at
Cambridge University, became aware through his reading
of a new spirit animating contemporary Persian literature,
and obtained leave of absence for the purpose of studying,
at first hand, the sources of this influx of imagination
and power. This volume is his authoritative and dis-
interested account of the Babi movement which, as we
have seen, furnished the social impetus culminating in
Bahaism. Professor Browne, it is interesting to record, is
the only European having had personal intercourse with
BahaVllah.

II

The Universal Religion : Bahaism. Hippolyte Dreyfus.
Cope and Fen wick, London, 1909.

M. Dreyfus, Docteur en Droit, Orientalist, and student
of religious philosophy, has presented a brief but profound
history of Bahaism, with a discussion of its social import.
He presents his subject from the point of view of the most

220

APPENDIX III 221

enlightened modern knowledge. In his treatment and
conclusions we see reflected that rational acceptance of
religious truth which, as in the case of M. Bergson and
others, is transforming the logical Gallic intellect into an
instrument of ampler scope and influence.

Ill

Some Answered Questions. Laura Clifford Barney. Kegan
Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co. London, 1908.

This book is perhaps the most valuable of all works on
the Bahai teaching. The author spent many months at
Akka, having daily access to Abdul Baha, whom she
questioned concerning the Bahai interpretation of religious
problems. The questions and answers cover important
aspects of the following topics : The Influence of the
Prophets in the Evolution of Humanity ; Christian
Subjects; the Powers and Manifestations of God; the
Origin, Powers, and Conditions of Man ; and miscellaneous
subjects of a metaphysical nature. Some Answered
Questions, being the Bahai teaching interpretated for a
Christian inquirer, translates this revelation into our
medium of thought and feeling. It brings the European-
ized Christian tradition in touch with Bahaism, and thus
offers to Christians a line of logical advance within their
own doctrines.

IV

The Hidden Words. BahaVllah. Chicago, 1905 ; Paris,

1905; London, 1911.

"This is that which descended from the Source of
Majesty through the Tongue of Power and Strength upon
the prophets of the past. We have taken its Essences and
clothed them with the Garment of Brevity as a favour to the

222 THE MODERN SOCIAL RELIGION

beloved, that they may fulfil the Covenant of God ; that
they may perform in themselves that which He has
entrusted to them, and attain the victory by virtue of
devotion in the land of spirit."

Eighty-three short sayings, with communes and prayers,
which form a book of devotion ever full of impulse and
revelation.

V

The Seven Valleys. BahaVllah. Chicago, London, Paris.

In the vivid imagery of travel, BahaVllah has revealed
the successive stages of spiritual evolution ; the Valley of
search, the Valley of love, the Valley of wisdom, etc. It is
the pure psychology, expressed by the prophet from his
own discernment.

VI

Kitabitl Aqdas. BahaVllah. Bombay.

The " Most Holy Book," the chief work of BahaVllah,
dealing with society.

VII

Kitdbu'l Ighan. BahaVllah. Chicago.

The "Book of Certainty," with explanations of the
scriptures and the argument of BahaVllah. Nos. VI.
and VII. include the most important elements of Bahaism.
Other works of BahaVllah, however, are accessible, ex-
plaining the relation of religion and science, religion and
the Orthodox Church, etc.

VIII

The Bahai Proofs. Mirza Abul Fazl. New York, 1902.
A most lucid and satisfying work for advanced students.

APPENDIX III 223

IX

The Mysterious Forces of Civilization. Abdul Baha.
Cope and Fen wick. London.

The work which most definitely marks the advance
Bahaism represents over existing revelations. It is spirit-
ual insight turned upon society in its permanent and
transcendent capacity ; and formulates for the West its
own modern social tendency.

Tablets of Abdul Baha. Vol. i. Chicago, 1912.

This volume, a collection of letters written by Abdul
Baha in answer to questions on every aspect of religious
and philosophical speculation, contains the most authori-
tative and illuminating interpretation of Bahai thought.
Until BahaVllah's works are fully translated, the various
tablets of Abdul Baha constitute our most valuable
reference.

Nos. III., V., and X., compose a shorter list of references,
which will reveal much of the power of the Bahai teaching.
It must be understood, however, that Bahaism requires
instruction and study, since all its conclusions are rationally
derived and presented.

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